Moving Targets

Well I spend way to much time building a new virtual machine and migrating 98% of the content for two domains to it only to have my ISP of almost eight years, www.Visi.com pull the plug on all of their Frontier Communications customers. I cannot blame Visi, they made a business decision based on 150 customers in the Frontier phone service area and Frontier probably pricing them out of profitability. The short version of the outcome is I have decided to go with www.Arvixe.com as a hosting provider and I am switching from DSL to Cable Modem service. We shall see how well it works out, but for now having a hosting server in a data center beats the pants off my DSL line serving up the gallery photos at a whopping 384kbps which translates to 48Kbps if I achieve 100% throughput.

On top of the increased speed for general content, Arvixe.com does everything with cPanel and the Fantastico installer. I think I had 90-95% of my stuff configured and populated in a few hours outside of moving 2.5GB of photos that took about 10 hours. I cannot even begin to add up the hours I spent building the Virtual machine, installing packages, provisioning the apache setup for two domains with three sub domains on one and two sub domains on the other only to still need to configure each separate website to work and migrate the content. I also can walk away from Frontier as I am looking at www.Voipo.com as an alternative to Vonage.com. $13/month for phone service beats the $35-40 we've been paying for over six years before you add in the DSL service.

I'll see how the cable company does with me - at least I can stop worrying about not being able to host my site on my residential service now that Visi is gone.