Donovan's Brain

Over a year ago, my web host, Joyent, sent an email encouraging me to migrate to their new and improved server. Oh, joy!

This wasn’t just a flip the switch kind of migration. One look at the howto page and I resolved to put the effort off for as long as possible.

Well, I avoided the inevitable but finally faced my fear this weekend. Why now? Well, I intend to host rivers of news in the near future. While not a huge business undertaking, I do want to build the website that will power my small company on a solid foundation. Now is the time to migrate, I told myself.

For the most part, the migration went well. I started on Saturday morning and finished up on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t work on the migration the whole time, of course. Real-life got in the way here and there.

I tweeted a bit about my adventure. It was nice to see an enthusiastic Joyent rep, Jason Hoffman, cheer me on and answer questions throughout the process.

Since I manage eight domains, it was good to go through this process. I eliminated some unused email addresses, learned a bit about importing and exporting MySQL databases, troubleshooting 500 server errors, and more. Not really the kind of thing I want to do every weekend but one of those times where the learning process is actually kind of fun.

I’ve been a Joyent customer since 2006 or so and am happy with their service and offerings. I can highly recommend Joyent.

Now, on to hosting rivers of news.