The last month has been painstakingly long. Not just with finals but with getting my server off GoDaddy and onto Rackspace. Today is my last day with GoDaddy before the contract expires. I have everything downloaded and all my databases backed up, but not everything is online. Even one site that I was hosting for a friend in Iraq will be lost. He is unable to make the change on his domain to the new server so the site will go offline once the old server is shut down.
Already I have noticed an incredible difference. Tasks that used to take 1-2 minutes on GoDaddy take about 10-20 seconds at most now. Working with ImageMagick and having the server resize pictures that I upload is a breeze, I never imagined it would be this easy. A photo album with a couple hundred pictures can be resized in 4 different sizes with EXIF data read and published in less than 30 seconds. I could have gone to Starbucks and got coffee in the time it would take GoDaddy.
The speed alone is more than enough of a reason to leave GoDaddy. The tech support makes it even better. I submitted a ticket with rackspace telling them I needed some plugins installed so I could run Laconi.ca and other things like NetPBM, ImageMagick, and FFMPEG. There was about 12 programs on the list, and my ticket asked which ones were already installed, and also for my user name to gain SSH access to install them. Within 15 minutes I got a phone call from them telling me that they can install all those programs for me, but wanted to tell me that they can’t offer any support for 2 out of the 12. Less than an hour later, they sent me an e-mail telling me all the programs I wanted have been installed, the upgraded me to the latest version of PHP, and included my SSH info. Just under an hour, they did a software update that would have taken me a day or better working through a SSH terminal to install and test.
This doesn’t come without a price though. About 5 years ago I was paying about $20 a month for some shared hosting service, now I am paying about $400. I actually pay more for my website than I do for my car. I thought GoDaddy was a reach at $180 a month, butnow I am seriously paying our the ass for a web site. Never thought it would come to this.
I make the switch from a shared host to a dedicated server about 3 years ago just after one site I made was all the talk on several media outlets. The shared host that provided “unlimited” everything told me that I was so special I was getting a limit. The search engine that was on the site was being used so much that it took a lot of resources from the server. In fact with GoDaddy I had issues with that server during high peak times. I have had as many as 10,000 search’s in a single day, and 70+ concurrent users online at once visiting my main site.
I have about 30 domains at the moment and while I would love for RazorNylon to take off and for me to be a tech blogger I think that I am stuck with NCOSchool. NCO School is my pride and joy, and the one that pays the bills so I really can’t complain. I have a couple other sites that practically run themselves that help our financially as well, but NCOSchool is number one in several areas.
NCOSchool.com actually just broke several milestones this last week. 1,000,000 page views, 2,000 registered users, and 2,000 followers on twitter. So why do I want to get myself away from it? Well, its a military site that helps soldiers. I sell it as an open source community for soldiers to share and exchange knowledge and expertise. I’m no longer in the military so my personal expertise isn’t what it used to be and things change making it hard for me to stay on top of things. I don’t want to rely on a site in which I can’t really take a part of myself.
I did try for a good two months on trying to get RazorNylon off the ground by tech blogging. At best I think I spent 10 hours a day prepping and made about $10 for the month in ads from cafepress. The logic in bloggin like that doesn’t pay off. Although I did enjoy it. NCOSchool though has a lot more potential and I have about 4 main projects and 20 more minor ones. I am turning the site into an Army specific search engine. Topics will be categorized like Yahoo! was when they first came out and in my case it will work because I am not trying to catalog the entire internet, just the Army, and I will be the only one doing it.
This is going to take some time, and with other issues with school (saving that for another post) I might have a lot more time on my hands being stuck on a waiting list for classes. I have been implementing a lot of these ideas into NCOSchool already and they have turned out for the better. I am getting more traffic daily, and it looks like more people are staying around longer instead of grab and go.
I think I will have to re-work RazorNylon into something else again, maybe move the blog and just have the old CMS based site back with games and everything. I just wish I could get it off the ground like I did with NCOSchool.
* See a need
* Fill a need
* Get stuck filling that need for the rest of your life!
