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March 2, 2009

Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes

I learned a week or so ago that the machine that hosts this blog, among other things, is going to be homeless at the end of March. It's an old white-box PC, sitting in the back room of a small IT company in Orange County that a good friend of mine worked for for many years. They're moving offices, and putting all their internal servers on virtual machines in a data center, where rack space, network and power cost real money.

So now Vince and I need to figure out our next steps - either find a new place to host said box (which probably means buying a replacement and hosting it at one of our houses), or finding other places to host the services currently running there (personal email, a handful of mailinglists surviving from the BBS days, a couple of websites, and DNS for all our domains).

DNS hosting seems easy - xname.org is doing a fine job as a secondary for my domains already, and flipping them to be primary doesn't seem a big risk.

Email is slightly more problematic - I've gotten used to having pretty complete control over the address space in my domains - Dawnise and I make up and give out one-off addresses, and have a couple dozen "communal" addresses that deliver to both of us (things like credit card bill reminders).

My first look at Google Apps suggests it's pretty promising - and I suspect I could probably learn to live with the restriction on the number of accounts/aliases. So I've pointed one of my domains at Google Apps as a test.

Outgoing personal mail seems pretty easy (and seems handled by Google Apps) since Dawnise and I always send mail from our primary accounts.

And the mailing list support looks reasonable, too (tests in progress).

So that leaves this blog...

Since 100% uptime isn't critical, I'm thinking I could just host it at home.

We've got about a week to decide if we need to buy hardware and plan to migrate data from the box in SoCal to one of our houses.

More news as there's news...

Posted by dberger at March 2, 2009 9:57 PM