The move to a hosted web account

05 Jan 2009 - Dave

Prompted by the deal at DreamHost

During the holidays DreamHost had a great deal for web hosting.  For a flat fee you got hosting for a couple of years without the monthly charge.  The only catch is you have to register a domain.  Plus I think with each day that flat fee went up a little.   That was the incentive I needed.

What to move

The first thing was to put up a simple html page on the new domain.  Just a five-minute thing with Vim.

Next was to move my Redmine app from the server in the basement to DreamHost.  DreamHost with Phusion Passenger supports a Ruby on Rails app called Redmine.  It took a few visits to DreamHosts wiki and a couple of forums to get things running.  It was worth it.

It only made sense to host my handful of Subversion repositories there also.  They are more accessible which helps since I’m working more from the laptop.  Hosting the repositories on a basement server over a DSL line has some disadvantages.  It was workable but when the dynamic ip address changed it took anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours to update.

The email system cannot be moved.  It doesn’t look like this hosting plan has the level of access needed to get my email server components running.

Concerns

I worried about hosting mainly because of experience with another web host.  DreamHost didn’t have those problems.  (the names are left out to protect the guilty)

It only makes sense to back up everything on the host.  I read where DreamHost does regular backups.  That’s great but having another backup is even better.  The BASH scripts I used for backup on my Linux servers only needed a few changes.