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Dreamhost: should I switch?
I’ve been hosting my sites with Dreamhost since 2004, when my prior hosting provider suffered an infrastructure meltdown (and subsequently fumbled over the response). I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer, for the most part.
However, over the past year or so there been small incidents that have made me question my commitment to DH as a hosting provider. There have been site outages, email outages, a control panel “upgrade” that feels clumsier than its predecessor, and most recently a major security breach that sent me scrambling to reset passwords.
Two things have kept me from moving to another provider:
- Inertia – I have lots of stuff on DH, and migrating away is going to take more time and effort than I can muster at the moment.
- Transparency – Even though DH’s service has been less than stellar as of late, they’ve consistently been very transparent about communicating with us clients about the issues. Here’s a good example. This frankness is refreshing, and very different from my experience with other providers.
That said, I’m still on the fence about whether or not to switch. I’m particularly worried about Dreamhost’s mail servers’ performance; one of the options I’m exploring is switching only our mail service. (Possibly to Google Apps.)
If you have any recommendations or thoughts on these issues, please drop me a line.
Goodbye Movable Type
Today I switched jarango.com over to WordPress. This site had been using Movable Type since 2002; in those days I’d been happy enough with MT to make a donation to Ben and Mena Trott (before they became Six Apart). When MT became a commercial product, I stuck with it out of loyalty to the platform. However, I’ve never been happy with the way MT handles comments. Also, while having the site rendered as static files had been a plus at the beginning, site growth had made refreshes very slow at this point.
The last straw came last weekend. After having spent considerable time upgrading to the most recent version of MT—in hopes of re-enabling site comments—and liveblogging the Panama Canal Expansion referendum, I found out that the Typekey authentication was now not accepting comments on the site at all. I’m fed up with MT at this point, and not willing to put any more time into it.
So now, WordPress. The move has been relatively painless; Dreamhost makes installation absurdly easy. However, there may be breakage in the site content… if you find anything screwed up, please let me know. (I know the archives aren’t working well with Firefox… gonna fix this over the weekend, when I don’t have a deluge of emails to answer. Fixed!) The site’s theme is adapted from one Jorge Yau and I developed for BootStudio’s Spanish-language blog (this means only one codebase to maintain).
Downside: I now run the risk of fiddling away countless hours playing with WordPress’ myriad plugins.
Technorati Tags: wordpress
jarango.com v14
Time for a theme refresh. Notes on the new design:
- Comments and trackbacks are now re-enabled. I’m requiring Typepad authentication for the time being, and am going to be selectively enabling the comments per post. Let’s see how it goes.
- Simplified navigation and visuals.
- Lastly, but most significantly: I’ve decided to discontinue the Spanish section of this site. jarango.com has been bilingual since 1999, but over the past two years most of my writing for the site has been in English. It’s become too much trouble to keep both sites working in parallel, and I find this has hampered my posting frequency in both languages. More on this in a future post. (I’m keeping the old Spanish content online for archival purposes.)
In an interview last year, I said that this site’s redesign would be a radical departure from previous versions. If you’ve been here before, you’ll note that this is not the case with this iteration; page and site structure are very similar to what they’ve been over the past couple of years. Instead of focusing on a major redesign at this point, I’d like to work on producing more content.
Site upgrade – Movable Type 3.2
It’s been a while since I’ve tinkered with this site’s infrastructure. Last august, I was forced to turn off comments due to the large ammount of spam I was getting. I’ve been missing this functionality ever since, and the time has come to do something about it.
I’ve been testing WordPress and ExpressionEngine for the past couple of weeks, but have decided to stick with Movable Type for the time being; I don’t have the time to tinker with my custom templates, and I don’t like the standard themes on these applications. So this site is now running Movable Type 3.2. I’ll be re-enabling comments over the next couple of days; hopefully the new spam-fighting plugins are an improvement over the previous version’s filters.
Anyways, this is a long way of saying things may be weird here for a while. Please let me know if you see anything broken on the site.
