alex chiang: web 6.0

My old hosting company was Total Choice Hosting. While they don’t suck per se, I do not recommend them. They are no longer giving out ssh access, and if you do manage to complain loudly enough to get a shell, they will give you a jailshell, which is some sort of weird restricted bash shell. The implications of this are that you do not have access to gcc or other normal utilties you would expect in your path. Annoying.

The major problem with TCH is their mailing list implementation, which truly sucks. Apparently, mail sent to a mailing list in your domain goes and sits in some queue somewhere. Then, some cron script occasionally comes and checks the queue. If it finds messages, it then invokes exim to send the messages out. This might be ok if the job ran more often than once every several hours. Imagine trying to have an email conversation between 30 people, but you could only communicate once every three hours. Yes, you are correct in thinking this is dumb.

I switched to DreamHost. Much better in every aspect. You get a real shell via ssh and you get real mailing lists. The knowledge base they have set up is actually useful, and everything else Just Works ™. I’m on the $8 / month plan, so it’s slightly more expensive than the $5 / month I was paying at TCH, but for $3, it’s worth it. DreamHost has their act together.

Making the actual switch was pretty easy. I just setup an account with DreamHost and then started ftp’ing stuff over from TCH. I was able to setup a subdomain under dreamhost.com to test things like this blog and my gallery, and once everything looked like it was working, I simply changed the DNS entry to point to DreamHost’s servers. Easy.

The only minor gotcha was that I’m using an older version of MovableType. I don’t know much about the new version 3.0, but I’ve read a few muddled reports about people complaining, so I wasn’t too inclined to switch. Additionally, when I went to the sixapart website to check it out, you have to register for this typepad thingy that I wasn’t too keen on. So I just moved the old installation to the new server hoping that things would Just Work.

Close, but no cigar. In the installation instructions for MT, they instruct you to run the mt-load.cgi script, which sets up the MySQL database, among other things, and then to delete it since you’ll never need it again. Not such a good idea if you ever switch hosts and can’t find a tarball of the version of MT you’re using. After some creative googling, I managed to find a copy of mt-load.cgi, which I was able to run and setup my databases with.

The correct solution is to rename the file to mt-load.cgi.bak and remove execute permissions for the file. This way, if you ever decide to move hosts again, you’ll have the script needed to setup your blog database.

Everything else went without a hitch. Switching hosts is pretty easy, which should scare the crappy hosting companies out there.