Migration

Yet another time of migration (blog-wise)…

TextDrive -> Joyent -> TextDrive 2

My web hosting has been a little up in the air recently (see Slashdot: Joyent Drops Lifetime Account Holders).

I paid a few hundred bucks several years back (2005) for “lifetime” web hosting at what I perceived to be a cool up and coming company (read: they claimed to be pushing to support a lot of the flashy new web tech that wasn’t well supported by most shared web hosting providers at the time). It was their alternative to seeking VC money, and clearly lawyers weren’t involved or they would’ve left themselves an easy out. I re-upped after they merged with another company, changed names, and made a new Lifetime upgrade offer (with similar very clear terms on what constituded “lifetime”). Leap forward to 2012 and the company wanted to shed this liability, leading to a big PR mess since they handled it horribly. I’m still waiting to see how things shake out, but it looks like they’ve spawned a new company (with the original company’s name), brought back the founder, and will release a revamped shared hosting product and maintain lifetime account holders under this new company. I still worry about whether this is a scheme to be able to kill off this new company soon and legally nuke the “lifetime” accounts, but I’ll see what comes since I have arguably gotten my money’s worth out of the hosting I’ve had to date.

Linode VPS

With all of this going on, I’d been hearing good things about the VPS provider Linode, and they had an anniversary celebration where they were offering effectively 6 months of free VPS hosting, so I took them up on it. Now I’ve got a nice Linux VM that I manage and can do with as I please as opposed to being constrained to the software stack a shared host provides me. I’ve really liked it so far, so perhaps at some point I’ll get around to doing a quick writeup on it and my setup there.

Wordpress -> Octopress

I honestly haven’t updated my blog nearly as much since having kids, and got tired of having to check in on it every few weeks to install all the Wordpress security patches. Moving to a VPS meant I had to start worrying about memory footprint and was more directly concerned about host security, so I decided it was time to follow the current trend and go back in time with a statically generated website. That’s where I ran into Octopress that looked like it was full of good stuff. I was able to migrate all the old Wordpress content by doing an export and running a converter tool (exitwp) and some manual cleanup for image content and long since dead links due to previous Wordpress upgrades. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it since it ends up being nice and portable across web hosts, drops the need for a DB backend, and mitigates performance and security concerns.