Resizing slices and… Moving on up

Pondering this evening about moving a bunch of services around and generally just making life easier and cheaper for myself online

In particular, after a long time using a few people I’m moving some things around, so there might be a little disruption over the next few days as things get shuffled around.

1. Domain registrar
   I’ve been really unhappy with my current domain registrar lazylizard which I registered way back when in pre-history. Almost every year without fail they forget to renew my registration and disable wakatara for a day or so. So, moving over to godaddy

2. Email and calendaring
   I have been very happy with textdrive for a while, and have no beefs whatsoever with them except for the fact that shared hosting has been a bit limiting so thinking of actually moving the entire wakatara mail infrastructure to either google or build another server for mail and other services. Cost-wise google has it beat hand’s down but need to see if I’ll have as much flexibility as I’ve had in the past controlling my own mail servers. I guess for main mail I can make gmail the main and then set up other mx records for domain servers.

3. Web hosting
   Is looking pretty strong on slicehost. I’ve been using them for a while and am quite happy with them. In particular, having my own virtual server is more what I’m used to and keeps me honest about my skills and what I’m doing. Well, I’ll say that now until the first time I completely hose my server. Just waiting for the slice upgrade to finish off right now and then I can post this I guess.

4. Repository hosting
   I am really loving git and using it all the time and have completely abandoned svn except where I need to use it for work related things. So github is looking very nice actually

5. Backups
   Even though I’m not really liking it that much, am using Mozy (it’s slow !). Might move things over to a simple rsync and amazon S3 but at the moment, it’s hard to beat $5 a month.

Cross your fingers and hold on… ought to be interesting.

I am a little worried about the degree of dependence this is forcing on me on online services, but considering my alternative to this was moving a _whole_ bunch of stuff over to amazon ec2 and S3, it’s probably a sounder choice. Hope Richard Stallman is wrong about that whole cloud computing thing being a trap.