For many years I hosted massena.com on an old ‘386 box connected via ISDN at my home. I enjoyed having complete control over the software installed on the machine but didn’t like the site going down in the event of power failure, HD crash, or whatever. I also didn’t like the bandwidth it took away from my personal use and having another computer in the office always on and whirring away. Eventually I migrated the site to a shared host at DellHost and when they exited the business I moved it over to CrystalTech. While CrystalTech has provided me with great service I miss the absolute control over the server that I used to have.
When I discovered the low cost ($99/mo) dedicating hosting plan offered by ServerBeach I had to try it out. For the price I get an Athlon 2100 server with 60 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM and a monthly bandwidth quota of 2 TERABYTES tapped into ServerBeach’s high-speed backbone. The machine is all mine, I can put anything I want on it, and if things go wrong I can even remotely reboot it (while praying that things haven’t gonetoo wrong). I’ve been gaining experience and confidence in the ServerBeach setup since the beginning of the year and I love it. The server is fast and its internet connection smokes. Today I’m switching the massena.com domain over to it.
CrystalTech hosts Windows Server 2003 and my ServerBeach machine hosts Debian Linux (they’ll also host Windows if that’s what you want) so I’m migrating from the .NET blog (dasBlog) and photo gallery (nGallery) applications I was using to Linux equivalents. I’ve chosen WordPress for my blog and so far am very happy with it. WordPress is professionally developed and has a dynamic community of supporters enhancing it with tons of plugins and themes. For my photos I’m switching to Gallery2. It also has quite a bit more functionality than my prior solution. It’s not very attractive at the moment but it is highly styleable so when I have some free time I’ll be able to take care of that.
It’s nice to be back in control.
Darrin's Blog 