Claude Montpetit -- Montpetit.net -- en

I lost the machine that was hosting my weblog. This machine was kindly installed at Macadamian (thanks for the connection!) I was managing it from my home. I believe that the power supply exploded.

Anyway, managing a server is a lot of work. Even for a simple site like this one, it requires managing the web server software (I was using Tomcat's development web server which may not have supported being slashdotted, should I have written something of real geeky interest), a FTP server, a remote access software (VNC). Then you eventually need what I did not have: searching capabilities, comments support, a database server, daily backups, and ... hardware failure recovery.

And all of this keeps you busy doing stuff that is not necessarily bringing you forward in your current development.

So I switched to a web hosting company that does most of all this stuff. I was surprise when I realized how low prices had come down to. I get all the basic software installed and configured, with a nice web-based control panel to manage settings for Apache, a Tomcat web app, FTP accounts, Email accounts, DBs, Web and FTP statistics, shell access, perl, python, and much more. The hosted initial setup was painless, and it took me a couple of ours to install Movable Type on top of this.

I am now up and running after the couple of days required for the nameserver IP changes to propagate.

Next step: Import all my weblog posts from my blogger account, try to figure out how I am going to handle translated posts in Moveable Type, and create a more personal layout.