It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site — ibm.com/patrick — was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York and then in 2003 moved patrickWeb over to Interland which was subsequently acquired and became Peer1. The dedicated IBM server at Peer1 in Miami has been very good for the past four years but managing it has become a bit complex and time consuming. With all the bad guys out there trying to hack into anything and everything there is a need for near constant surveillance — even with all the automated tools. I decided that having a shared server with constant and professional monitoring was better than having a dedicated server with part time security inspections. patrickWeb’s new home is at DreamHost.
DreamHost is an employee owned company. They seem to have a passion for providing solid web hosting at a very affordable price. For $7.95 per month you get more capacity than I can imagine using. They have no telephone support but the combination of a really good interface to their hosting environment plus a good Knowledgebase and normally responsive email support makes me feel confident. One thing I like is their status page where you can always see what is going on. Adding and managing databases is a piece of cake and Dreamhost includes full backup “snapshots” of your data at various regular intervals — hourly, daily, and weekly.
Last weekend I bit the bullet and began the move of patrickWeb and other sites and related email that I manage over to Dreamhost. I changed the DNS servers at Network Solutions to point to the Dreamhost servers in Los Angeles instead of the Peer1 server in Miami. The change propagated through the Internet in a roughly a day and most everything works. There are a few glitches on patrickWeb that I haven’t figured out yet. If you see some pages on the site that have a missing menu, that is one of the issues I am working on. Feedback on broken things is always welcome.
The cost, speed, and reliability of DreamHost is just one more reminder of how much the Internet is being woven into our lives. Not that long ago it was necessary to get a CD and install software on your PC to be enabled to utilize an application. Now you can get almost any application online. In the early days of dial-up modem connections to the Internet it wasn’t practical to depend on the Net for applications. With "always-on" connections, high speed, dramatically low cost storage, and impressive new Web 2.0 interfaces (such as kayak.com), the Internet is really becoming the computer. The next phase is surely going to move that capability to our handheld and mobile devices. The Nintendo Wii with WiFi and the Opera browser offers a glimpse of the future that is right in front of us.