Biannual blog update

Every couple of years I seem to update my blog. So, here goes.

I just moved my web hosting to webfaction. The shortest version of the story is, I started a company and have been doing some Django programming and webfaction is really good for Python-based hosting and I realized some of what I’ve been missing out on. In fact, I’d used them many years ago to host a Plone site for the UU Fellowship of Winston-Salem. (Anyone who advertises that they host Plone sites is pretty hardcore.)

Looking under the hood, I feel better about webfaction because…

• They let you run multiple “applications,” which you can tie to one or more “domains.” For example, ‘johnborwick.com’ (no ‘www’) is running a bare bones application that just forwards people to ‘www.johnborwick.com’.
• They have their own WordPress installer, which makes me feel better than the Fantastico/whatever the replacement for Fantastico is called. For my old host, if you wanted to keep your site up-to-date with the package manager you’d wait for a few weeks before they got the upgrade script. (I have also started to feel more comfortable giving WordPress the permissions needed to update itself.)
• If I want to start building simple services for people, I can easily set them up as new applications on my account. (Before, I’d used Google App Engine to build a few test apps, but you have to subtly change your apps to run in that environment and I’d read some FUD about the ability to scale/lack of control you have with GAE.)
• I feel like I have a lot of control, but the framework makes good sense.
• They are highly regarded.