Teach42

Unless you’ve been a reader/subscriber from the begining, you may not know that both this website and the podcast are hosted on an ancient computer in my basement behind my TV. It was too old for my dad to use in his office, so he was going to throw it out. I’m somewhat of a packrat, so I took it from him and put it up in the attic. It sat there for a year. Towards the end of the summer, I decided that I wanted to have my own web page. Since I’ve always been a do it yourself kind of guy, I took that ancient beast from the attic, downloaded a copy of Fedora Core 2 and installed it on there. The computer didn’t really have enough power to run a GUI, so I just installed a basic command line version. I threw on MySQL, Apache, PHP4, and a copy of pMachine. Once I st up DynDNS, I was able to point Dembo.org to my basement and my real blogging career began.

I knew that the computer wasn’t exactly ideal for a web server, but it handled single pages just fine. I never noticed any dip in bandwidth when people visted the blog, and I was thrilled to have been able to set the whole thing up from scratch for less than $50. I told myself back then (all of three or four months ago) that if the blog ever really took off, then maybe I’d look into upgrading the computer or possibly some more sophisticated hosting. I never really expected that to happen though. I thought that it would be a wonderful problem to have!

Well, since I started podcasting, I noticed that my internet began to go slower and slower. There have been serveral instances where we couldn’t get enough bandwidth to get us through to Google. My wife has been very supportive of my endeavors, but if she can’t read her Yahoo Entertainment News, I might be in some serious trouble. I guess it’s not really the server, but the bandwidth that’s the problem. The reality is, my DSL’s upload speed is just way to slow to keep serving up the podcast. It’s too bad, because I really like that hacked together server. However, it’s time to move on.

I think I’m going to wind up moving to BlueHost. They have great pricing, a ton of nice features including SSH, and a nice affiliate program. At first i was thinking that I would just host my podcasts there, but if I’m buying the space, I might as well move my sites there as well. And so long as I’m moving everything, I’m even thinking about moving away from pMachine in favor of something like Moveable Type or Wordpress. I’ve been having a few problems with pMachine, not serious ones, but so long as I’m moving, it seems like a fine time to make a switch.

There are much more ‘important’ things for me to be blogging about methinks, but I wanted to let people know that things may be in a state of flux for a little while. I’ll try to keep you posted. But in particular, check your feeds. If your feeds don’t have a Feedburner address, then you’re subscribing to my old direct rss feed. Unsubscribe to that one and subscribe to the one from Feedburner that’s listed now. I’ll make sure Feedburner is always pointed to the correct feed. I’ll keep you posted about the changes as they happen and hopefully it will be a fairly painless move.

Now I have to figure out what to do with my little starter server. I feel like it’s R2D2, a little banged up but still a real workhorse!

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