On February 2, 2010 I finally completed the server move to the new co-location facility. I had, in the prior weeks, backup all data and files, did a clean install of the operating system and restored all functionality to the server. The new facility will not only help achieve faster load times, but a much better environment for the server than sitting at my house under my desk. With this move you all should notice faster page load, better usability and the RSS feeds hopefully will load and refresh across the Net faster.

Sometime within the next week I will be taking this server offline so I may perform some system maintenance and upgrades. At that time, I will also be locating it in a new data center so the actual speed will be what it should be and the performance should be increased dramatically.

There will be many system updates taking place at that time – some of them will include a complete Linux upgrade, Wordpress upgrades, database upgrades and more. Most of these items will be performed in multitude to lessen the down time.

Once all the upgrades are done, within a day or two after I will be moving the server to a new data center. This will allow the server to operate at a fast connection, with much more ability to serve the growing needs of several blogs and other sites hosted on it.

.Net Code Snippet

I took on a position of web developer and have now setup 2 Linux servers, coded a C# .Net app from the ground up and am looking at major site updates using Coldfusion. While entertaining, fun and challenging, it has meant a bit longer days at work than I had anticipated – however I am NOT complaining in the least amount. I have a full time job and am paying bills and getting caught up on things. That’s always good!

The past week and a half has brought more changes – I was told we are going to look at revamping the entire site and work and will be doing it in VB.Net, so more learning, which is one of the things I love most about IT and web development – the constant learning, expanding and maintenance of knowledge. With that, we are looking at making it easier to get content out, expanding on and integrating more with social media and getting an infrastructure in place that will allow forward motion, expansion and easier maintenance. This also means a more enhanced visitor and site user experience, which is always something that is highly important.

The other thing of note, is that I will try my best as I go through Coldfusion and .Net programming to get some tutorials, how-to’s and other related posts up on those subjects. I will be learning quite rapidly and am sure to have some struggles to fight through, and those are the items I would like to post about.

Things seem to have gone pretty smoothly, and I am getting reports that the site load time is pretty decent, so that is a plus. I have most of the plug-ins I use reinstalled and configured, minus one or two of them that I chose to wait a bit on. One of the nice things is, with the new server I have access to more updated software, which allows more functionality for use in the blog and other areas.

I am still experiencing issues with the server, and I still have the new server to swap it out with. I just have not had the means to do so yet. The issue I keep having is a kernel issue involving swap space. Just this morning while typing a post, the server started to lockup and started kicking errors. Luckily I had an SSH session open that allowed me to kill some services, perform a reboot and get things going again. I am not always that lucky.

As part of that, I will have to add an additional point to the post Why I Fail At Blogging. Another part of the reason I don’t promote as much as I could, nor post is server reliability. You don’t want to start getting tons of traffic, or even a moderate level of traffic if your hosting server is not reliable. Nothing irks me more that trying to get to a site and having it load slow, or worse, not at all. With that, sometimes publishing a post is painfully slow, problematic and makes the entire blogging process