Of the many challenges that we have in the upcoming move, there was one major one that was my own fault. But you get complacent, you know? I have been using the Speakeasy DSL service, as they had a “geek friendly” package where you pay an exorbitant amount of money to them, but you can do whatever you want (on whatever port you want), and they leave you alone. 2 static IPs, a dozen websites, and services ranging from mail to dns (and beyond) later, and I’m pretty entrenched. Some of the stuff I had been hosting for another group I have started to move to a more traditional web hosting service, but for my stuff, I wanted a little bit more. I had been investigating things, but now that the move has begun to gain momentum, I needed to spin something up.

My choice was Rackspace, and oh, boy, am I ever happy so far (ok, ok, it’s only been 6 days, but still!). I have my own cloud server where I have full control over a complete Linux install. The first day, I had a web server, a database server, and a nameserver running, and had started to move things over. 6 days later, I’ve moved almost all of my stuff (including this blog).

Of course, to a sysadmin/web guy, a machine is a machine, it doesn’t really matter where it’s physically located, or, these days, if it has any physicality at all. So what’s the deal with Rackspace? It was easy to get the server going, the metered billing (based on bandwidth) is fantastically cheap for what I need, and little details like the iPhone app I can use to control aspects of my server all make it painless. And painless is so good…