If you are seeing this post, it means the DNS change has propagated to your server, and you are seeing Terminally Incoherent being hosted at it’s new location. If not, then… Well, then you won’t be reading this.
The most drastic difference you probably notice with this switch are the load times. I wanted to apologize those of you who enjoyed the slowness of my old host. I know that most of you would take coffee breaks, or few minutes of work in the time interval that took my pages to load. This “feature” is unfortunately gone.
The move was actually pretty smooth, but work intensive because the new host is a VPS box hosted by Linode (thank you for recommending it). This meant that I had to do build a LAMP stack from scratch, which is something I have not done in about a year or so… So I’m fairly sure that I forgot about something crucial and shit is going to break at some point, but I guess we can iron out the little problems as they arise. So far everything is working fine.
I also wanted to mention that I’m very impressed by the Linode support team. I had a silly off-hand question about my bandwidth quota (it seemed lower than what I signed up to, but that’s because they are pro-rated). I got an email response in 5 minutes flat. I kid you not! If they are that responsive on all issues, then I believe this will be a long and fruitful relationship.
Thanks for recommending them too me. Linode got by far the most love in the comments and on twitter. I can now see why.
Hopefully this is the end of my server woes. With a little bit of luck, the plan I picked will be enough for my traffic and resource usage, and I won’t go broke because of this move. But I think it’s going to be worth it. Honestly, this last few days were a torture. Normally when I get ideas in my head, I sit down and write blog post drafts. But with Dreamhost fucking things up for me I couldn’t even do that. Fortunately I have enough posts queued to last us to mid next week.
Thanks for putting up with the lousy performance in the last few days. Let me know if anything seems broken in any way.
I will leave you with this: Dreamhost sucks. Sure, they have cheap “unlimited” shared hosting plans, but the support is lousy, and there are hidden limitations like memory and CPU usage caps on your processes. And if you somehow run afoul of these there is nothing you can do other than buying their VPS plan. In fact, this was the fist thing their support team recommended to me. They were more concerned with selling me new service than with helping me to resolve the issue. So don’t fall into that trap. Dreamhost is like the Comcast of shared hosting providers, if that makes sense.
Edit 6/22/11 11:47am:
Whoops. I just found two things that did not work correctly. One was /dev/random (link in sidebar). After changing the name servers to linode ones, I forgot to make an A record for it. This should be fixed now. Also, email notifications currently don’t work because I don’t think I have sendmail/postfix installed and/or configured. I will get to that later today. No ssh access from work.
There will likely be more little things like that cropping up over the next few weeks. Bear with me as I get my stuff together.
Hmm, potentially looking for some sort of hosting myself, good to know there’s at least one ‘good one’ to go for.
@ Matt`:
Yep, I’ve only been with Linode since yesterday, but the performance is way better. Though it might also be due to the fact that the data center where my box is at is in Jersey, just a hop and a skip from here.
Just keep in mind you will need to do everything by yourself. Linode does have pretty good set of docs that will take you step by step through things like getting a LAMP stack going, etc… I used them for reference to make sure I don’t forget anything.
Congratulations!
A small thing: can we get the preview comment button back? (I assume you disabled it to improve performance on the old host?) I promise I will not use it too much, and consume all that new fancy bandwith you got :)
Wow, the load times are dramatically better. Great change!
@ Tino:
Ops, I forgot about that. The preview button should be back now. I disabled it and the comment quick-tags because they were the least crucial plugins I had. :)
@ jambarama:
Awesome, glad it’s not just me that’s seeing the load time improvements. :)
Load times are better here also!
Now just don’t forgot to update your server when new security patches are available ;)
I have a generally crappy connection here at work, and the load was near-instantaneous for me as well. Nice to see you’re back!
Awesomesauce! I have been really happy with Linode. I swapped over May 1st so my exposure is little as well. Personally, you can’t beat the price for the resources. I especially like having control over the reverse lookup. People trust me more now that it looks like I actually own the IP address. When it comes time to upgrade the OS, just get another slice for a month and take your time transitioning over since local traffic is free on Linode.
I am glad it worked out for you. I am sure you will be like me and start writing all kinds of cool scripts to run that you were not allowed to do before.
Nice move! Works great from here too…
My experience with tickets with Linode have all been sub 5 min, but all simple stuff.
Its really quite handy, I use it alot for things like a small webdav server for mobile org notes/privatish blog, or as an ssh tunnel when on open wifi networks, or as an ipv6 tunnel.
I dont think I could go back to not having it. I sorta wish when using the ssh tunnel that the data center was closer.
Never had an issue with your blog being slow before thou, a couple of times it wouldnt load at all. Wonder if google reader, preloads the source site or caches the data in some way. Thou im not sure how rss works does the content still come directly from the source site (the feed being meta-data only)?
On a side note on the fly preview is awesome, and so markdown for comments
@ k00pa:
Yeah, I suspect that having to do my own updates will be the only downside of this move. :P
@ StDoodle:
Interesting. Usually work connections tend to be good. I have a 50/20 FiOS account here which is several times faster than my Comcast connection at home.
@ Craig Betts:
Hey, good idea. Might be cleaner than doing a dist-upgrade on my own.
@ Ron:
I’m fairly sure that both Firefox and Chrome do some pre-loading in the background these days (unless you have disabled it manually). Plus, once you load the page once stuff like CSS, images and etc usually sit in cache, making subsequent load times take a fraction of the original load time.
I guess the sluggishness of my site was most evident when logged into the dashboard and editing posts. That’s where the real slowdowns were.
Congrats on Linode! Great choice, I am also running a linode box. And like craig, I have things running on it that I don’t really need but I wanted to run because I couldn’t before. :P