Well, she has found a new gig, interning at http://blackskyradio.com/listen-live. She’s on the air every weekday from 2PM to 7PM Central time!

Check her out. The Nightmare & Co. show is hilarious!

I will build your small business website for $250.00, and host it for $75 bucks for the first year. Blogs I will set up for $50 and host the first year for $30 bucks.

I’m also doing custom websites half price through September. So if you need something neato, now’s the time to do it.

The latest project I’ve worked on is Black Sky Radio. We are streaming audio 24/7… that would fall under the category of custom websites.

In the interest of explaining myself as well as telling you about my craptastic weekend, let me tell you what that involved.

First, on Thursday I ordered my new web servers. It took about 8 hours for them to set them up and configure them to my specs. So first thing on Friday I began copying accounts from my old servers which were strewn about all over the country.

Because I was dealing with companies who were not the most helpful, and because they didn’t want to lose my business, they decided to lock me out of SSH when they realized I was on my way out the door.

I know that doesn’t mean anything to a lot of you. But what it meant to me was instead of copying the entire contents of my servers, I had to copy one web account at a time. I have a LOT of web accounts. I had to login to the old server, create an account backup, log in to the new server and import it, then check to make sure it wasn’t FUBAR.

That process took all of Friday (till 3:00 AM) and most of Saturday (till 3:00 AM). Sunday I got up early and started the ugly process of getting nameservers sorted out. My own nameservers could stay the same, but their IPs would be changing. That part was pretty easy. I simply changed their IPs and told my old servers hostname to forward to the new server until it all resolved.

The ugly part came in when I got to my last 60 or so accounts… the ones that I created when I first started hosting. They used 3rd party nameservers. That started the horrible process of finding out where each domain was registered, finding a way to get access to it, and changing the nameservers one at a time.

That left a handful of domains that were customer registered instead of registered through me. I had to contact each of them and ask them to please change their nameservers lest they be site-less.

At the same time, I decided that my company (who has 20 websites) needed to be on their own dedicated server, so I spent quite a bit of time getting that to work properly.

After a hellish weekend, I’m not just sitting around waiting for DNS to resolve fully before I stick a fork in those old servers.

If you’re an IHS customer and you get any weird errors in WordPress, just holler. Sometimes file permissions default wrong when they get copied.

I’m talking about the prominent ad I’ve put on my sidebar.

Yes, I know I have always said I’d never advertise. Well, I don’t get any revenue for advertising LiquidWeb. I’m advertising them because they have been incredible to work with, and I want to recommend them to anyone who needs a dedicated server.

Of course, if you just want to host a website, you should come to me.

Their claim to fame is quality and support, not cheapness (as most hosts are these days). While running IHS, I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best data centers in the country.

I’ve had servers at Verio (in D.C.), Fortress ITX (in Maryland), Equinix (Chicago) and ColoServe (San Fransisco). LiquidWeb, based in Michigan, has impressed the crap out of me ever since I put my first server in there about a year ago.

My first centers were Fortress ITX and Verio back in 2004. Both have very good track records, both have 99.98% uptime, and both have 24/7 support. The way their support works is you submit a ticket electronically, their level 1 guys try to answer it and then escalate if necessary. They don’t have level 3 guys there 24/7, so if it’s a critical application they have to page someone in the middle of the night. That takes time.

Equinix I chose for their reputation, and again… good infrastructure, slow support. Not to mention, when you host at any of those other places, you are expected to do all of your own software updates (including linux, apache, etc.) as well as your own security and backup. For those of you who know… that’s a lot of work when you’re talking about a fairly good number of servers.

I purposefully located them all over the country to avoid being killed by outages like that one that took out the entire East Coast (a big ICANN server flaked out).

However, upon further examination, that wouldn’t have saved me anyhow, because a big chunk of the DNS hardware is part of that network.

LiquidWeb has fully managed dedicated hosting. You can buy a server, but they configure and keep it secure, updated, manage backups, etc. They have load balancers, offsite continuous backup, dedicated switches, remote KVM, etc (for a price of course). They have a 30 minute support guarantee (they average 10 minutes), they have a 100% uptime guarantee (the only data center in the country to offer that), and a 30 minute hardware replacement guarantee. They offer all of those guarantees even with their cheapest dedicated servers (starting around $150 per month).

Add to that the fact I can directly call a level 3 admin 24/7 and speak to him immediately… I can’t tell you how much money that’s worth to me.

IHS migrated all of our servers to Lansing, Michigan this past weekend. I still get redundancy because they have my servers spread out across their data centers. Each data center has an n+1 rating, so even a single data center is redundant within itself.

Now… all this joy and happiness doesn’t come free. Each server is $940 PER MONTH. Granted, they are NICE servers. Cadillacs.

For you nerds out there: Dual Xeon E5420 2.5Ghz quad core processors, 8GB RAM, RAID 1 500GB SCSI array, 500GB SATA Backup drive, Guardian Continuous Remote Backup (500GB), 4800GB/month tier one bandwidth, and a dedicated gigabit uplink port for each server.

When you add up all my servers there’s quite a bit of money exchanging hands in the name of IHS. This is why I don’t make any money at IHS even though I have a crapload of customers… My goal is to be quality AND cheap. You can’t do that and get rich…

Anyhow, the one thing I DON’T sell through IHS is dedicated servers, so if that’s something you or your company needs, click my link to LiquidWeb and you’ll see what I mean. They are the best. Yes, if anyone ever DOES use my link AND buys a server, then I will get a referral fee.

I may be a whore, but at least I’m not selling Google ads.

You would think (based on the name) that there might BE a lake.

However, our shelter was located conveniently in a small patch of grass surrounded by asphalt and trees. No lake.

The weather was nice, however, so it wasn’t too bad.

The plus was we took Sheriff, and for the first time in his life, he was completely exhausted by the end of the day. It was great.

Well, no time to write more. Gotta keep working on these stupid servers.

Changed DNS on about 200 domains ONE AT A TIME.

Now I’m waiting for them to resolve. I hate this part of web hosting. Waiting sucks.

Anyhow, no big update today.

I’m tired and I also don’t know if this will still be here once everything resolves…

There’s a good chance something’s going to blow up while we do it.

I’m not looking forward to getting 10,000 emails about people’s sites being down.

But, my site is hosted there, too, so we’ll all be in the same boat.

Argh.

My head hurts already.

ANNOUNCEMENT: This site now offers nested comments. That means you can reply directly to someone else’s comment and they will know you’re talking to them. To comment on someone else’s comment, click “Reply” directly under their comment. The comment form will then say “Leave a Reply to [their name]“, and when you post your comment, it will appear directly under the comment you’re replying to, indented so it’s obvious.

This feature will allow you to yell at each other without me being confused and thinking you’re yelling at me. It also allows for easier debate, because everyone will know who’s talking about what. You can even reply to a reply.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking “Boy, I sure would like that on my website.” Yes, it’s a cool feature, just came available in WordPress. I’d be happy to set it up for you, but since it takes about an hour per site, I can’t do it for free. I’ll be spending my next three days working for nothing if I agree to do that. So if you’d like to have your site set up for it, and you’re willing to part with twenty bucks, let me know. Otherwise, check out WordPress.org for instructions and try doing it yourself. Don’t forget to backup files before changing them (I screwed up my site 3 times before I got it right).