Tag Archives: slicehost

Moving… To A New Old Host

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I’ve been using Slicehost for more than a year now (since March 4th, 2008, with a little break in between May to October of that year). All the while, I’ve become a huge huge fan of their service. Why?

Montastic tells me that Slicehost suffered a bit of downtime during my time with them (via a quick Gmail search), but it happened so rarely that I can’t recall ever being frustrated at the service. (How about Dreamhost, you ask? Ahem.)

It’s been quite the experience, trying to admin a VPS at Slicehost. It was a lot of fun and pain trying to set up an Ubuntu server from scratch. I learned quite a bit, and found respect for all the unsung sysadmins out there.

But lately, learning more and more about the art and science of system administration almost feels like premature optimization. That’s not to say that the subject matter is not interesting (or easy, because it’s completely insane how the Internet exists), but I’m going to wait until when the optimization becomes that much more effective.

This feeling is magnified by what I’ve been doing with this slice. The full potential of this $20/mo slice has gone to waste, being used to host only this WordPress install.

The fact is that I bought this slice, thinking that I would be deploying some major webapps. You see, past-JK would have thought that future-JK would be awesomeing all over the place. Current-JK is sad that this is not the case.

But he is hopeful. Uh, back to first-person.

I’m hopeful. I also have a couple non-programming projects I want to start up, and it’d be nicer to have a solution that has a more pay-as-you-go style of billing. I am back to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Change. Change always brings something new and exciting, doesn’t it?

And this post is how I end the first half of the year of 2009. Kinda not very exciting, but I’m learning to find excitement apart from dates that have merely numerical quirks.

January In Review

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I really should have done these, at the least, weekly, but I guess this is good enough for today.

Seattle

For 4 nights and 5 days, I had the pleasure of visiting Seattle with a friend of mine from Chicago. To tell you the truth, I haven’t had a real vacation since I visited San Jose in 2006, so I really needed this trip to get out of town.

Definitely quite the trip. Did all the touristy things I could think of, and then some. This involved, in order:

  • Downtown: I didn’t know this place was so hilly, more on this later.
  • Seattle Public Library: Beautiful. I could get so much work done here if it wasn’t so crowded… and if the Internet didn’t suck as much. Very interesting color choices on some floors. (Yes, an entire floor of blood-shot red? Awesome.)
  • Shiro’s: Sushi? Yes. $5.50 for toro worth it? HECK YES.
  • Space Needle: Definitely picked the best morning to go up during our stay. (As a sidenote, not a single droplet of rain during our entire stay… I heard that the whole rain thing is a bit of misnomer. Just a lot of overcast/fog.)
  • Sci-Fi Museum/Experience Music Project: Sci-Fi Museum was kinda broke, but the EMP was hotness. So much fun messing around with the demo exhibit. Totally bring over a band to practice…
  • International District: Lots of things to see… only if I had a Chinese friend in Seattle. Had the best Dim Sum at House of Hong (of course, this was only my second).
  • Underground Tour: History of Seattle, learned that the place was actually even hillier… and shadier…
  • Mars Hill Church: Pastor Mark Driscoll is the man. And the music, oh so good. And the people, oh so awesome.
  • Microsoft: Visitor’s Center is quite well done, except it’s not as big as I thought it would be. Campus is quite large and pretty. Reminded me of Yahoo!’s campus, but only bigger and shinier.
  • Nintendo: Eh. What’s a visitor’s center? Oh, that’s right… it’s integrated with the customer support center, featuring the most nondescript office buildings I have ever seen.
  • Pike Place Market: Chowda. Confectional. Blah blah blah. So much to do and see and eat here.
  • University of Washington: A beautiful campus, with some very interesting architecture.

This really isn’t a comprehensive list, but all in all, a trip to be remembered (and it has been recorded… maybe one day you’ll see the video I recorded). Definitely opened my eyes to Seattle as a possible option for where I want to be in the future.

Cost: ~$700. $229 for plane, $150 for hotel (Thanks, Danny), and like $300 for food and everything. Totally worth it… especially the sushi. Freaking sushi…

Sickness

On the last day of the trip, I awoke with a headache and a sore throat. This only continued to get worse, on the plane and on the drive home. My entire body was shaking violently as I tried to keep warm. It was insane.

Popping DayQuil and NightQuil like candy, I tried to stay alive. (Add digestive problems on top of some ridiculous headaches and nasal blockage, as well as the aforementioned chills…) I missed work on Thursday and Friday, and felt miserable coming back to work on Monday. Really, what a horrible end to such a wonderful trip.

Giving Up?

All the while I was sick, I kept trying to bring back the blog and restart my efforts for HanMeta. (The keyword here is try, I don’t remember much of that weekend…) But really, I kept getting hit in the face with failure. And maybe if I did it with a fully recovered brain, things would have gone better… no, I take that back; I just didn’t know what the heck was going on.

In the end, I got better. (I think today, I am finally rid of this) But from it all, I’ve realized that I’m probably going to have just as much, if not more, crap times ahead. What will pull me through next time, other than my silly human fickleness? I don’t know. I sure hope, at that point, I’ll have enough happy thoughts to get me through the dark times. That, and hope. And faith: Faith in knowing that this is what I really really want to do.

The Last Two Weeks

It’s been tough, but I’m getting the hang of the server admin hat. No, I take that back. Let me start this again.

It’s been tough, but I’m starting to realize how insane server administration is. Just having that appreciation alone has made me a better person. Of course, this isn’t stopping me from trying to keep going with this… but definitely I have a post or two in the works on the matter. Maybe one day I’ll have enough knowledge to share with the world, but until then, I hang on to Google queries like a n00b. (This, by the way, is definitely a post-worthy topic… the fact that while you can search exact error strings, some docs are just horrendously out of date or just wrong.)

Got the blog back up, started to set up some Rails server side business, and slowly learned more Ruby and vim in the process of these past two weeks.

Health

Gym. Once every two days. It started, purely coincidentally, on the 1st of this month. Let’s see how long this streak lasts. And I have no idea how I lost 5 pounds. I think it was probably because I was sick. I guess it’s good news? I sure hope it’s not muscle loss.

This cold weather is wreaking havoc on everything. I don’t think I can stand another winter. Good thing I’ve already made plans to be out of this town by August… the question is where to go from here. More on that later.

And So…

That concludes another long post. Congrats on reading up on my life, as I portrayed it. One thing is for certain, I really want to write more on HanMeta stuff as it unfolds. I’ve been recording some podcast-y material while I leave notes to myself, but I wonder if I’ll ever get the courage to post them online.

Quite A Bit Of Work

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So much work in the past couple days, coupled with the fact that I’m still trying to cope with the insane flu I caught while coming back from Seattle.

I am now fully hosted on Slicehost. I am afraid for my server’s life, hoping all of my server administration was done correctly and without holes. It was fun wearing the sysadmin hat again, and for such a long time too… definitely learned more about how the heck Apache worked… never ask me to write up a virtual host file up again, because I still don’t know why it didn’t work the first time.

But yes, things are mostly back to normal here. Still have a couple plugins to set up, a few UI changes I’d like to make, but definitely liking how the site’s a lot snappier than it’s been in the past. Here’s to my 256MB slice holding up okay.

Goodbye Dreamhost.com, Soon?

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It’s been a fun ride. I love your company’s willingness to be open, with your dreamhoststatus.com page and your awesome blog. However, I can’t take the recent flurry of downtimes, which are just causing me quite a bit of pain.

I’ve been using a service called Montastic to track down time. In the past two months, my site has been down not once, not twice, but eight times (and even, two and three times on the same day).

This is from my gmail account. I get emails from Montastic when the server goes down. And when I do get the email, I go check instantly.

Downtime.

Some of these were hiccups, with it possibly being Montastic’s fault. Though, often they were huge downtimes that really hit my traffic during peak hours. By the way, my web server name was erebus, and I can’t even find postings about it in the past two months on the dreamhost status page.

I can’t really trust Dreamhost like I did back in the days when my web presence wasn’t very important to me. I think it’s still a great starter web host, hiding a lot of the menial tasks of setting up a web server… it’s just that I feel as though I need to move up to something a little bit more… expensive?

I’m thinking Media Temple. I might just go all out and start using Slicehost as my main blog and dev server. I might throw in some Amazon S3 for making my site even faster. Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: Looks like I may possibly be sticking with Dreamhost. I went and played around with MediaTemple for a night, and I didn’t like what I saw. The UI isn’t very clean, as much as Dreamhost was. Maybe I should talk to Dreamhost directly to get a response on these down times…