Blog Migration

$8.89 Web Hosting

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Last year when the promotional deal I had for three years of Web hosting was running out I purchased a VPS costing about $24.00 for the year. A VPS, aka Virtual Private Server is a Virtual Machine at a hosting provider that is setup just for you/me. It is a nice playground to let me install use the compute power however I want it. The deal I bought I thought was great. To renew via the traditional hosting plan I had at the time would have run me like £15 a month. I wrote about the crazy costs of web hosting when i purchased the VPS (Virtual private Server) aka a Virtual Machine dedicated for my use at a hosting provider.

I have had really good luck with the VPS and the provider. I even purchased a 2nd more powerful VPS when they had a New Years sale. I use each VPS for different purposes however the one I used for hosting I have used all year. The only slight downside is that its my responsibility to manage and maintain. In a big deal however it is in the back of my head what happens if I have a catastrophic failure. I do have back ups it would be awesome effort to get the system restored. Thanksgiving started rolling around I kept my eye out for new deals for hosting. When Black Friday came around the same provider that offered the VPS deal had a deal for what they call CPANEL hosting for $8.89 a year. Basically that means they were offering a managed hosting package for less money a year than many plans offer for a month. There were some small limitations on the number of domain’s i could link to the account. For a few dollars more i could increase the offering. For my needs the $8.89 plan was just fine. I “splurged” and bought 2 years for less than $18.00.

One thing I like about this provider is when they offer a deal it’s not an introductory one. Meaning I just renewed VPS purchase last year and I feel exactly the same amount for the renewal. This is a refreshing change from pretty much all other mainstream Web hosting providers at the deal the offer is only good the first time you buy it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing out there setup. It has been pretty stable. Anything I have wanted to do i have been able to. Building that confidence today I migrated my mail and blog over to the new hosting. The VPS i have is not going away. I renewed that already for the next year. I will continue to use it for some other apps i host and a few other things however i will entrust my blog to the hosting provider instead of running on my own VM.

And no I cannot tell the difference between the £100+ per year hosting vs the $8.98 a year one. That is what amuses me.

Now lets hope that after writing how things look stable they do not blow up in my face tomorrow.

The Story of My Site’s Hopefully Last Name

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It’s another year so its time for me to overthink my blog setup. Alright maybe i dont do it “every” year however sometimes I do. Last year I changed my blog domain name to scottodyssey.com. I did it in 1, hopes of getting more google rank vs my obscure .ac domain. 2, to better reflect what i was thinking the direction of the site was. Flash forward to now and i am thinking of simplification. For years i have lived with the delusion of anonymity on this site by obscurity. I knew if someone wanted to find me they could. THe illusion felt good though! Now a days thinking abut personal branding using just my first name or a cute blog title isn’t what i am looking for. Instead i am simplying to scott.weinstein.me. I owned the domain name and used it for some email for years. I figured why not simplify.

The change for me is minor. The bigger changes are in how i use a bunch of other domain names behind the schemes for mail and other things that is bigger. My plan is to downsize and save some money on a few more expensive domains that i am under utilising. For some of them it may take a while to move all the things i use them for off of them. In the long run it likely makes sense.

This change allows me to have a simple domain that reflects me. It is my name after all.

www.scottodyssey.com will stick around mirroring my new URL for about 10 months until the domain expires.

Blog Redesign

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Now that I have moved to a new hosting provider (Typepad) I have decided to try out a new layout of this blog. I am now using a 3 column layout with links and lists on the left as you can see. Not sure how much use I will get out of the list function once the novelty wears off, but I am trying it out now.

I like the subtle color scheme instead of the in your face yellow and black I used to have. I liked that scheme too, but this new look seems cleaner.

Expect more tweaks and changes over the next few weeks.

The Blog Has Moved

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I have taken the plunge. I have left my cushy free hosting provider. My friend had a problem with his linux server. I almost lost 2 months worth of posts. That was a big scare, but not the reason I moved. In the end Gus got the box up and I was able to backup my stuff. If I didn’t have a backup that was my fault anyway.

Gus now has to rebuild that box at some point. I will be down for that. That was a motivating factor in my decision. The simple fact is I have been eyeing a different solution for my blog for some time. I actually am now trying out SixApart’s (If you are from mars, they make MoveableType) Typepad. Typepad is a pay service, but they offer more functionality than the free moveabletype. Most of my website now consists of just my blog entries, so I am trying the free trial out. Then if I like it I will fork over the nine bucks or so a month for the hosting.

The one problem I have run into is the fact that I cannot get blog.Scott.ac to resolve to the new typepad site. Turns out they offer domain aliasing but only for www.sitename.com, not somethingelse.sitename.com. I am going to email them and see if they can get this to work. I don’t want to redirect my entire site to my blog. If I cannot get typepad to resolve blog.Scott.ac, then I will loose all my links and people wont find the site. Not that many people view it, but it will be annoying.

I am trying out a new look on the Typepad site. Not as out there as the yellow and black look of the old site. Let me know what you think.

new blog server

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Ok after all the work I did fixing my moveabletype server, I have moved my blog to Gus’ server. He was kind enough to let me run my blog on that box so I can free up my server to continue my linux education. I was afraid of damaging my blog while I messed with linux. The new blog looks the same as the old one, it is just on a different server. I just ordered a new style sheet for the blog, but wont have that for a day or so. Blogstyle’s is a great site, but I hate having to pay for stuff.

I have to say the import/export features on Moveable-type are fantastic. getting the data from one blog server to another took like 10 minutes total. Setting up the server took longer than the actual import. It was great. Exporting is also a great way to backup your blog entries. I will do that on regular intervals now.

Now I am off to play with exchange 2003. News on that later, if I get it working correctly.

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!