The Marmot’s Hole

I’ve finally moved to a dedicated server.

Well, a virtual one at least. Ye Olde Blog is now hosted at Media Temple, which seems to come recommended by a number of respected bloggers. If it’s good enough for Starbucks and Binary Bonsai, it’s good enough for me.

BTW, my old host—Bluehost—was nothing but helpful, and I highly recommend them. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—this blog has gotten way too big to handle on a shared server. Between the posts and the comments, there’s a ton of shit here, I get a lot of search engine hits, traffic is fairly high, and it doesn’t help that I get more than my fair share of spam.

David Seah has a good tutorial on moving your blog to Media Temple, for those who are interested. I needed a ton of help from dda, however.

Anyway, things should be back to normal, although I’m still trying to figure out why my DNS isn’t propagating the way it should (UPDATE: Figured out what was wrong—just needed to edit the wp_options table, which we’d changed temporarily during the move).

On a design note, I’ve implemented a random banner image—hit refresh and you should see it in action. If you’d like to create a random banner image on your Wordpress blog like your Uncle Marmot, Chris Pearson tells you how to do it.

All in all, I’m happy with the load times, even without WP-Cache, which seems to have problems with displaying comments (I’m sure they’ll figure out a solution soon). My sidebar, however, seems to load a little slow—if anyone knows why that might be, I’d appreciate your help.