I wish it was photoshoped!

Well, the success over at Hostgator wasn’t long. I took a decision to move host again due to recent irritating slowness when loading the page. I investigated it a bit and then decided that a host in US really isn’t working for me, so raised my budget and started looking for a host in Europe.

My first attempt was to find a decent shared host in Europe within the $10-15 market. There are a lot of companies offering hosting in this pricerange, but all seemed to run on overloaded servers and/or have very restricted TOS/AUPs. As I was browsing around I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my hosting and what requirements I had (being a former Dreamhost customer has really raised my standards on a shared host):

• SSH access
• Located in Europe
• Been around for 2-3 years atleast and wellknown on WHT
• Fast and good support
• Acceptable AUPs and TOS
• 300GB Bandwidth
• 5GB diskspace

As I couldn’t find any good offers I liked, I started browsing the VPS offers. Some of the offers I found here was some times cheaper and had a lot more to offer than a shared host. Thoughts of my own SVN, backgroundprocesses and even JAVA development would be possible. So I quickly moved over to look for a good VPS host instead and found a new home over at ConnectSwitch.

Setup was quick (within minutes), however my account didn’t get it’s own IP assigned to it. After about 24 hours and some support tickets, I got a new account with IPs assigned to it. Spent some time to configure it up and compared it to other hosts and found it was kinda slow (I think it was the CPU) but okay for my uses. However then the securitybugs with HyperVM was announced, they turned off the controlpanel (which is good as I prefer to keep my hosting secure). They also promised to migrate everyone to Parallells Virtuozzo within 48 hours. This is a great service, but it feels its more talk as I’m currently waiting for an update and it’s been almost 5 days now without any information regarding the move.

So I started my search again, found a new provider I looked at before called Future Hosting. They offer great service and good specs on their systems, however their prices was WAY higher than I was planning on spending. However with a recent special who gives 40% off they came pretty much close to my pricerange, so I made the decision to give them a try. Server is running great, good support and based in UK. I know it’s to early to say, but it currently feels like a good home for my sites and my development ideas.

Migration has started, lets see how it turns out when running live..

Now moved my site from Dreamhost to Hostgator. Dreamhost been more than stable and very nice experience. I really like what they got going with all the features they adding and also their attitude to life and their business. Hopefully they’ll open up something closer to Europe and I will become a customer again, because the load speed is really what motivated the move.

As the title says the site is now hosted in Hostgator. Even thou its still located in the U.S. I get a lot better speeds than from Dreamhost. Still have my 45 day money back guarantee if anything feels wrong.

And we can all start counting down until next christmas.. Yay!

To all who didn’t get our christmascard (would be surprised if you did as I didn’t send any), Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!

Finally got around to create a semi-new theme for my blog. This time it’s a bit more personal as it’s a revival of an old theme I used for my previously created blogengine called pBlog. It’s still in process of being converted to Wordpress, so still bits and pieces that doesn’t look all that good. Atleast it’s a start to make the blog my own little place..

Yeah, seems like it – Not posted in a while.. As normal! Life gone on and a lot has happened recently. I graduated and I got a new job, all in the same week. Life really works out nicely some times.

This weekend my partner had arranged a secret trip for me. He took me up to Gävle to meet up with my family to have a nice meal at a Greek restaurant. After that it was time for a nice concert with Jill Johnson. Not a big fan of her, but I like the music. The best thing was that it was mostly covers of other female country singers which helped to identify the songs a bit better.

What I liked was that she shared memories and thoughts about the songs she was gonna perform which made the whole performance a lot more personal than commercial like concerts normally are. Apparently she also been standing outside greeting everyone to the concert as well, nothing I don’t see many artists do unless you buy their CD with a signature (if even then). She has a lovely voice and it worked wonderful on the old countryhit Jolene by Dolly Parton.

To sum it all up; very pleasant evening with good company, tasty food and lovely music. Only harsh thing was the 2 hours drive there and back again.

So, the site is still alive. It’s recently been moved to another server, since the old one is about to hit the grave. Might not be the fastest hosting, but it’s damn cheap and more than the site really need.

Some development have been going on with the Synology box I mentioned in my previous post. I now have rtorrent running and currently working on a web-interface to get some more control. There are a couple of them out there already, but none of them has the functionalities I need so slowly creating my own.

While making a post, I just have to add that all my classes are now done! Only thing remaining of my school years is a LIA (practise while working thing). Currently located at an IT consultant firm until the end of May.

Just recently got this new toy I can play with, a NAS with features such as Bittorrent, streamingserver and a webserver (apache with PHP Support). Sure it can also store my most important files nicely and secure, but who needs that when you get so many other features to play around with. Synology (the manufacturer) also recently decided to open for telnet access to the machine, meaning it got even easier to install your own services and software. Right now I’m just learning how everything works, but so far it feels like a good choice of a NAS. Was looking on a QNAP which had about the same specs, but only supported 2 drives where this one supports 4 (total of 3TB). I seem to get some more time soon, so I will most likely take on some projects surrounding this box in the coming weeks.

Once again, had about a 2 months break from blogging. Wasn’t really intentionally, but been busy with real life issues and just haven’t felt motivated to spend time writing. Now school begun and with it comes the inspiration again.

Summer been busy, had a couple projects keep me occupied most of the summer. Most of them was work, but at least one of them was related to our home. We redecorated a room upstairs and made it our new computer room instead of the old room downstairs. Feels great to be in a fresh room (although it’s completly done yet) and also not have to deal with all the neighbors looking in at you every time they walking by. It’s nice and private!