After waiting a month for my ISP to deliver a fixed IP address, I decided to host my blogs off-site with a professional hosting service.

Enter DreamHost.

They were second on the list of recommended hosting services at wordpress.org.  No content censorship.  Their sales staff answered my questions about multiple domains and blogs in minutes.  They got my business, no problem.

Setting up a new blog is really about as simple as a few clicks.  Moving a blog from one server to another isn’t quite so easy, but I did it.  Not without a few minor glitches, but those were caused by customizations on my Mac, not with my new hosting service.

The Skepdick is now professionally hosted, availability and speed should be far superior than what I could deliver over a residential DSL line.

Got to give a thumbs up to DreamHost.

While on holiday for a couple weeks in April, something happened to my web server, as it became unreachable.  I was using it as a sort of heartbeat to tell me all was well with my house while we were gone.

Of course, the main worry I had was that someone had broken into my empty house and made off with my computer and everything else in the house.  The disappearance of my webserver coincided with an SMS on my mobile phone telling me I had 16 messages on my voicemail.  This was almost certainly my alarm system trying to call me until the alarm was silenced. 

Unfortunately for me, there is no roaming agreement between any mobile network in northern New York and Proximus in Belgium, so I couldn’t actually check my voicemail to hear what the alarm was.  We had left our landline contact number with our neighbor, and we got no calls from them.  I had to use Occam’s razor to arrive at the most likely conclusion of a power failure instead of a break in.  If it had been a break in, the external alarm would have sounded (for sixteen five minute periods).  My neighbor (a gendarme, fortunately) would have had to have been the one to silence it to stop the alarm system’s calls to my voicemail.  They would have certainly notified me on the landline, and they did not.

Most likely was a power failure, which will not cause an audible alarm, but will cause the system to call my mobile.  Also, a power failure alarm will self-reset when power is restored.

We worried about it anyway because we were out of position to do anything.  But it was only a power outage.  The notice from the power company of the scheduled outage was in our mailbox when we got home.

Occam was right.

The reason my web server disappeared is because I do not (yet) have a fixed IP address.  My dynamic DNS client (updatedd) for my domain registrar doesn’t work well using Mac’s launchd, and it seems that cron is finally dead in OS X.  So, I’ve been starting updatedd manually.  Of course, I wasn’t there to start updatedd, so the world soon couldn’t match my domain name to my ever changing IP address.  There’s got to be a better way.

Last week, I walked by my ISP’s office and saw no one in line.  I popped in and asked how much it would cost me to add a fixed IP address to my existing internet package.  Ten euro a month.  I spend more than that on a good bottle of wine.  Soon, this dynamic DNS problem will be behind me.  Now, all I really need is a good UPS for my server and my VDSL modem…  But I wonder, how much redundancy do I need when no one appears to be reading?

Here we are again.  Now to start working on content.