I’m happy to admit that this site is now a site about only this site.

Anyway. Pressing on!

After installing a couple of website monitoring tools, it became obvious that this website does down most days. Only for a moment or two (well, sometimes tens of minutes…) but long enough that it’s time to move to some real hosting.

I’ve used Mediatemple and Dreamhost in the past, and they were pretty ok. All the unix-ey noodling I’ve been doing with Raspberry Pis (and, recently, Mac OS Server) has given me the itch to try a Virtual Private Server, or VPS.

So I decided to give DigitalOcean a try.

Spinning up a “droplet” basically means starting a virtual Linux server within one of their giant shared servers. From there, you get root access and an IP address. The steps to get a web server running are basically the same as on a Raspberry Pi, except that instead of a tiny ARM core running the show, it’s a 64 bit hex-core Intel. On a crazy fast internet connection. Seriously, the load times are faster than from my local server. This is helped by the fact that the servers run all-SSD disks.

Nice.

That’s about it. I felt like I needed to post this, after having waxed lyrical about running the site on a tiny server! The Pi will be put to good use somewhere else. I’m not sure where yet, but I bet it’ll be fun figuring it out.