Light at the end of the tunnel

As some of you noticed, my blog just vanished from the face of the earth. And it did, for quite some time too. It was gone well over two weeks. Because of matters out of my control, the server this blog (and other domains) was hosted on was taken offline. But not only was it taken offline, after some time, the whole server was deleted. And yes, I didn’t keep any backups! When will I ever learn?

So I’ve been basically forced to find myself a new hosting provider, as I wasn’t too happy about my old one. This time around I went for a company called Linode, which has three data centers across the US. I speed tested all three centers from miscellaneous sites around the globe, and found their center in Atlanta to be the best. And boy am I happy about my new hosting provider. Not only is the connection rock solid, stable and fast, but their support response times are good and they’ve got heaps of resources at hand for their customers. Working on my new virtual server via SSH, is almost as working on a local server.

Being a Debian fanatic, running Debian as my host operating system also brings quite a few perks with it. Not only do I know this operating system very well, but it also gives me exactly what I want. A good sane package manager that doesn’t break the system, and a good selection of good stable software. Setting up a LAMP server on this baby was a breeze, and now I got myself the best online presence I’ve had in years.

Hopefully, you’ll be seeing a lot more activity from me from now on. And rest assured, I’m here to stay. Again, I want to apologize for the inconvenience that this server outage had. A special apology goes to my friend Scott who had his server hosted with me, a server which is no more and lots of content lost. And also to my friends over at #triviashack which site I also hosted, and got lost. I can’t say how sorry I am.

But a lesson learnt. A backup solution is now in place at my new host, and the backup’s go both to my mailbox and to a backup hosting provider located elsewhere. So this time around I will have no excuses if things go wrong. Take care, and stay tuned.