So, the email I (and scads of other people) got from Slicehost the other day was pretty uninformative, referenced a “forum” for continuing the conversation and didn’t link to it, and did very little to ease many of the anxieties it raised. After determining that the email (with a Rack Space letter head) was referring to the Slicehost forum, I spent some time reading up on the coming changes, and was underwhelmed. There’s a lot of re-assurances, a fair bit of hand-waving and talk of everything moving to the Rack Space Cloud. Clouds are grand, what with their puffy and ephemeral qualities, but I’m just after simple web hosting. This site uses almost no real bandwidth (a testament to my inability or un-desire to actually engage an audience) and serves up static HTML. My requirements are pretty minimal. I really don’t need the ability to dynamically add instances to handle the load.
Don’t get me wrong, cloud computing interests me and I can see its utility,
just not here. Not for a static site that Jekyll lovingly compiles into
HTML every time I git push deploy.
So I, and I suspect many others are doing the same, jumped ship. I’d heard good things about Linode, so I signed up. The account management system is already familiar to me, and I get more resources at $0.05 less each month.
Unfortunately, a new host comes with a new set of IP addresses, which means updating DNS records, which in turn means stale DNS caches. You might have problems getting here over the next couple days, or you might be running with the new DNS entries mere moments after I push the changes through my registrar. It’s hard to say, but eventually the updates will make their way to you, so sit tight and we’ll return after this short break!
Please enjoy the following identity: