January 18, 2007
We'll be back to normal soon, I promise
First, I apologize. I will have this blog back to normal as soon as possible. Give me a week but I hope to do it sooner. If you want to know what's going on, read on - some exciting and scary stuff is happening to my travel blog.
Things are crazy here. This blog started getting so much traffic that my web hosting company crashed. That's why you see the old version of my site. To move forward I need to buy a dedicated server, which poses two problems.
The first problem is money. I'm used to paying $10/month for hosting. Now I'll be lucky to spend less than $200/month and we might be looking at $400/month or more. I saw one that was $1800/month but hopefully I don't need that! Anyway, this problem can be overcome. I might have to do a donation campaign like Public television or something if we go over $400/month but this part will work itself out.
The second problem is that I don't know what to do with the dedicated server once I get it. I have no idea how to administer the server or get my site over there. I think I can hire someone to do this but not being in control scares me. I've spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours on this blog and I'm used to doing it all myself. Maybe I can learn to take care of a server, but this might take a while or I might fail. I'm not really technically gifted...
Anyway, those are the two problems. The good news is that the site should load very fast once we're back up and running, and we should see more lively discussions since we'll have more traffic. Unless I lose all my readers while the site is in limbo. Then I could just go back to my cheap web hosting....
Comments transferred from the old server:
Have missed your Blog, but understand the problems you presented. Hope everything works out without too much expense on your part. Thanks for the update and look forward to your Blog again!
Dian
Posted by: Dian at January 18, 2007 02:14 AM
James--
A piece of friendly advice: Don't get a dedicated server that you have to manage yourself. There are hosting companies that can offer you hosting that will scale as you need it to, without you having to manage the server yourself.
Talk to MediaTemple.Net about the MediaTemplte Grid Server plan. It will feel like one of these managed, shared environments, but they will behind the scenes scale your environment to run on one or even several servers if need be. They handle some high profile sites-- for example, I think they recently handled a product launch for Nike, and they are handling kiva.org, a nonprofit that has gotten a lot of media attention lately (showing up in PBS news broadcasts with ~1M people watching e.g.) and had their site overwhelmed several times before they found MediaTemple.
The plan starts at $20 a month, and scales upwards as your traffic rises, with some corresponding rise in price.
Another option would be a managed dedicated server. Typical is 1and1.com's Managed Server plan, though many companies can offer you this. You get exactly the same kind of fully managed, locked down environment you get in a typical shared hosting plan, but your site is the only one running on the server. In terms of flexibility it's no better or worse than what you've been doing, but in terms of scalability you get the performance of a dedicated server without the responsibility for figuring out how to operate it.
Those would be the two avenues I'd investigate if I were in your position. If you're not deep into this stuff already, you don't want to burn your time on this. Focus on blogging and making money.
Hope this helped you. In the interest of full disclosure, I do know the technical people behind Kiva.org and was featured briefly in a program about them on PBS, and I am a reasonably satisfied customer at 1and1 for both dedicated Windows servers and shared Linux/Unix servers.
Good luck... -Antonio Romero, Menlo Park, CA
Posted by: Europe Arts Travel Calendar at January 20, 2007 03:18 AM
Thanks - I'll check Media Temple out!
Posted by: James Trotta at January 20, 2007 06:14 PM
James--
I sent you the reference for MediaTemple.
Can you contact me off list? I would like to ask you something but not on the public comments feed.
Thanks,
-Antonio Romero
Posted by: antonio romero at January 27, 2007 01:32 AM
Posted by James Trotta at January 18, 2007 1:55 AM | TrackBack