..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights..
The tide may be turning for A Small Orange
I am certainly not alone when I say that shopping for a new hosting provider and transferring websites is one of my least favorite aspects of web development. In my experience, switching hosts requires waay too much time and rarely unfolds without significant problems. Nonetheless, when service and/or support turns sour, upgrading to a better host is well worth the effort. In my case, A Small Orange just wasn’t working out.
Everything was going fine for the first several months — excellent service, fantastic support, and consistent, reliable server uptime. However, during the last several months, server uptime frequently dipped below the 98% level, an unacceptable amount of downtime, especially since it generally happened during critical times: peak hours or while I was trying to work on the site. When I finally submitted a support ticket addressing the “unacceptable levels of downtime,” ASO support staff put my mind at ease by moving my site to a “a more stable server.”
Monzilla Media After working more than nine months developing Perishable Press into a valuable online resource, which houses a growing library of notes, examples, and ideas related to the creative universe of Perishable, we feel well-prepared to press ahead with the next phase of our secret plans. About a year ago, we purchased the domain, monzilla.biz, after deciding on a business name and refocusing our goals. Since that time, we have been sharpening skills and preparing for business. Now, as of May 1st, 2006, we are officially working on the Monzilla Media business website. Once established, Monzilla Media will serve as the business end of our creative endeavours, and shall be advertised locally as well as online. Monzilla will focus primarily on website design, however providing other services such as graphic design and photography may prove beneficial. In business, Monzilla Media will continue to strive toward perfection — pimping bold CSS & clean XHTML — creating beautiful, user-friendly websites that are accessible, standards-compliant, and functionally dynamic. It is our intention to focus on personal and small-business sites that deliver satisfaction while remaining affordable. We’ll tackle the big biz stuff down the road… For now, look forward to the impending release of monzilla.biz, the official website of Monzilla Media.
First, the setup. Perishable Press is a WordPress-powered website. On our previous server, we were running a Fantastico-installed WordPress version 2.0.2, upgraded from version 2.0. Permalinks were enabled and everything was running smoothly. Our database was only 13MB in size and around 12MB of that was disposable statistics information from WP-ShortStat and Bad Behavior. The crucial part of our database was a friendly 1MB in size.
For a good laugh (or reason to be even more depressed), check out the so-called “triple-aught-dot-com” domain sale, www.000.com, which makes no apologies for its blatant capitalistic piggishness. Seriously, it’s no joke when somebody is asking “…$500,000 U.S. (firm) on a first come basis” for a domain name. But then again, “the name itself has an extraordinary advantage in alphabetized site listings,” and after all, “the three zeros makes it an excellent choice to be used as a PDA or WAP portal for the wireless web” — so it’s all good, right?
