You’ve probably noticed that snarfed and ryan.barrett.name have been a little flaky lately. My hosting company, JVDS, and my server, SnipSnap, both started acting up at around the same time. They’d been happy for a while, but not any more. The honeymoon period is over. :/

So, after putting it off for the better part of a year, I finally migrated to a new hosting company, pair.com, and a new server, PyBlosxom on Apache.

I considered a few other hosting companies, specifically Dreamhost and 1&1. In particular, Dreamhost has a solid community, good features, and a rock bottom price. I care more about uptime, though, and while pair.com has a great track record, Dreamhost doesn’t. 1&1 guarantees 99.9% uptime, but I heard horror stories about them in most other areas.

It’s early, but so far, I’m happy with pair. Signing up and migrating my data was painless. After living with Linux for almost a decade, FreeBSD is a slight jolt to my sysadmin cortex, but that’s about the worst of it.

I can’t say the same about migrating from SnipSnap to PyBlosxom, though. I’d created a lot of content over three years – articles, pictures, blog posts, source code, other errata. Translating the directory structure, markup, and metadata took a lot of effort. Worse, I wasn’t creating any new information or value, so it felt totally unproductive.

I’m happy with PyBlosxom, though, and I expect much better uptime and stability from it. Still, you’ll notice some missing functionality. Change history, macros, the index, and the “recent changes” box are all missing. You can’t log in or register any more. Worst of all, due to a security issue, commenting is temporarily disabled.

Over the next month, as I find time, I’ll add them back. It won’t be a quick process, though. If something’s missing that you particularly liked, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.