Welcome back. After being down for 2 months, billybryant.net is finally up again.
I have been working for Sterling Steel since 6/10, commuting between Iowa and Illinois. We finally sold the house in Iowa and moved to Illinois. The old website ran on a salvaged 486 PC with Debian Linux and Apache for around 6 years in my basement in Iowa. When I turned the server off for the last time (it pained me to do this) the uptime was 456 days.
Our cable internet in Iowa had excellent bandwidth, a static IP was cheap and so this setup worked ok. The biggest issue I had with the setup was that I had to be the admin and I just don’t have time to stay on top of it properly. I decided that once we got moved (and I finally had some free time) I would find proper hosting and redo the site. I went back and forth between a setup using WordPress or Typepad. It was difficult to decide because either can do what I need. I decided to go with a WordPress install hosted at laughingsquid.
Electricity was really cheap in Iowa, it’s not so cheap in Illinois (like everything here). I calculated that it would cost approximately $18/month in energy costs to run a webserver at the new house. It only made sense to host someplace else, it’s cheaper, faster, more reliable and I don’t have to deal with the admin work.
The old website ran on rublog, a very simple and flexible ruby based weblog. I will be uploading all of the old posts into WordPress, but will have to do some scripting to manipulate them into an acceptable format. I’m on vacation for the next week and so I hope to make some progress on this.