My mood can be up and down when it comes to web hosting. There's times I want to move to new, shinier pastures. But I've been a HostForWeb customer almost since they started out, and have very rarely been disappointed with it.

There have been rough patches. I remember for about a year my site was consistently running slowly and I kept asking tech support over and over what could be done. Then one day... I noticed that it was just fixed. Just like that. Probably they just got new equipment or whatnot. I might have moved on if I had the time and money for a migration then, but I didn't.

There was another time I think I wrote on this journal that my site was shut down because of a spam report. That was also rough; for a while it took some convincing the techs I was not at fault. But I was able to work it out.

Well I'm back, and I have a few things to say. (Note: I wrote most of this while depressed, and we all know how pessimistic I am when that happens.)

First of all: Linode! I have my eye on this. It's cloud hosting like Slicehost, but apparently even better price-wise. Even Drupal users are giving it praises. Looks so nice... and I am getting concerned with the lagging on HostForWeb. It's just getting incredibly bad and I'm tired of month after month being told to post my traceroute as if this is going to solve anything. :(

Lately I've been told there are load balancing issues, and they're going to fix it... but I've heard that one before too.

I'm just worried because I'm not particularly motivated lately. If I move my site, it may take me a while to set up. And that's fine for me, but not fine for other people I'm hosting. :/ I'll be doing this from scratch, so I have to install everything successfully, and I'm totally unsure I can do this well within a reasonable timeframe. After what happened with Slicehost (me just lagging on actually DOING anything with it) I'm worried it will be a waste of money, particularly since I am planning to order the $40/mo version and thus will be paying $80 a month until I migrate everything.

As for my recent vacation...

I've been working with hostforweb to try and speed up my site. There were some memory errors lately, which I think have been fixed. I'm not sure about whether the speed is better though.

What I really want is a Xen VPS... Unfortunately I don't think hostforweb has those. But I'm also kind of iffy about moving my entire site without testing the server first. I know, I got slicehost for that. But I'm so lazy with it that I think I'll have to cancel and wait until I have more time to think about webstuff. Besides the fact that I'm not really confident moving my site to slicehost, as it feels more appropriate as a testing environment.

Roleplay and writing have been my main time foci lately, beyond worrying about things like reapplying for college (which I may wait till January to do now, as I've been told no one looks at the files anyway until after holidays), and whether I really will get my passport on Nov 25 (it would not surprise me if I'm getting jerked around again, geez). Oh and ordering new wedding bands and planning our little vacation for our 5th annversary (we'll be gone from Dec 17th-21st).

We also made a few purchases lately that have been entertaining and fun.

Again the thought comes to mind that I may need to move on from HostForWeb. Much as I've liked it here, it's becoming time for me to try for something more customized and lightweight.

So... I've ordered from Slicehost their bottom rung slice at $20/month. I'm going to be mirroring my main site from there, installing and tweaking things, and if I find it performs better than what I have on Hostforweb will upgrade to the next package up and start moving everyone hosted on my site over there.

I ordered my slice with Fedora 11 (Leonidas, lol! Now I can say my site is run by SPARTA! It was too amusing to pass up, that and I'm more familiar with Red Hat/Fedora) and I'm on the waiting list to see it set up. It'll be similar to what I had with grokthis, a Xen VPS, all vanilla. For now I think I will still try to run with apps I'm most familiar with, not ready to try something too dramatically different yet.

I just felt kinda bad about my site for a while because I couldn't get the server upgrade I wanted, so the migration nver actually happened. :( Apparently it isn't available yet, and someone else had misinformed me. Meh. I mean, I COULD get it if I went and moved my site to a new web host, but... I'm not keen on moving from where I've been a customer since 2001. It'd have to take some pretty bad service.

I may eventually consider it, though, but it'd have to be after a lot of research and with some free time for me to move things properly. I don't envision myself having much free time for months, if not years, so I am going to stick with what I've got unless slow website loading starts to bug me again. Eventually I should be able to get my upgrade!