Back With A Vengeance

My site has been down since mid-2013 but I finally got it back up about a week ago. Much has happened in that time (such as starting a new degree) and I plan to post some random anecdotes from the past year as if the down-time never happened. If you are worried about the site going down again, don't be. I am now paying $10 per month to Linode which is very organized. To make a long story short, Justin Hayes stuck it out well all this time, but after high school, most people just have too much uncertainty in their lives to be reliable web hosts.

To make it less short, the problem started when Justin had no choice but to use a Bell Internet plan that was not friendly toward servers. The possibility of getting the server back up seemed more and more remote as the months went on and I eventually asked for a copy of the data (which I should've had backed up).

By this time, the server was in a closet collecting dust and there was no easy way to get the data off. After months of procrastination, I eventually recovered the data in person this summer. I later found out that the USB drive we were using suffered from a bit of data corruption. Luckily the only lost files were parts of the Drupal core which can easily be downloaded again. With many pointless assignments to worry about, I decided not to migrate the data to a new server in September, thinking that this process would take a lot of time. I began to feel guilty about this decision when I read that certain Phoronix readers were missing my post about ATI Rage development. When the question of whether I planned to continue R128 development came up, a friend of mine answered this with a post, to which I can only say damn straight.

The process of using Linode turned out to be as painless as possible. They allowed me to set up an Archlinux virtual machine, which was exactly what I was using before. They also had it deployed a few minutes after I subscribed. I'm sure that in the old days, deploying a server for a customer took six to eight weeks. It still took me a few days to configure Nginx and learn how to import a Drupal database, but now I can confidently say that the bugs have been worked out. Let's see if anyone notices that this site is back to its old ways!