Moving Servers

After six years with my former web and e-mail providers, I have moved. The decision to move providers is never simple as a move demands rigour, planning, and significant effort to get right.

When your business relies on being online, anything that risks downtime or disruption is scary. I can not avoid some downtime but inviting the risk of additional downtime is never wise.

Moving providers is also an excellent method of determining where your infrastructure has undocumented dependencies or relies on subtle nuances of the underlying set up.

We have moved and all is back working nicely again. There have been some frantic moments and hand holding of services that took extra effort to move across.

With the move we have gained new features, more resources to experiment with, and support for IPv6.

No Thanks Cloud

The provider market has changed dramatically since my last shift. The push for managing everything yourself on a cloud service, like Amazon Web Services, is intense. I opted against this path because I am not a system administrator and prefer to avoid needing to manage critical infrastructure; that is a task best left to professionals who I am happy to pay for the luxury of not being too involved.

Midway

Instead we found a nice midway with WebFaction. They provide e-mail and web services, while allowing us to run our own services within reasonable resource limits. Time will tell if it works out.