Rob's Ramblings

Over the long weekend, Viviotech had a major outage due to a failed upgrade. I am one of the servers that had failures on the Viviotech backup process as well, which means my most recent server backup was mid-June. Not a very good weekend for me (but better than the one the Viviotech guys had to endure).

I do weekly backups every Monday of my databases, and all my web files are saved in a local CVS repository that I have backed up on my own. Unfortunately, the outage happened before I could do my latest rounds of backup, so my database backups are more than one week old. 

I've lost two blog posts that were done last week, and I know of at least two comments that got lost as well. My apologies to those people.

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So my blog has gotten a little dusty, this is going to happen from time to time. This is beginning the my busiest time of the year annually at work, and I also had some elective surgeries done in January to repair some longstanding issues finally fixed. While being doped up on Vicodin would make for some interesting blogging, I felt discretion was the bestter path to take...

But today Viviotech gave me a late Christmas present and upgraded my VPS to ColdFusion 9 (woo hoo!) and my old Mango Blog bit the big one because of it (boo!). I'm not sure why this happened, I had not altered the code in any meaningful way that shold have caused it to bomb. And to be frank, Mango Blog's error handling is... less than informative - even with Coldfire running I couldn't find much in the way of meaningful error messages to work on.

So, I backed up the database (God love MySQL for making this task a cinch compared to MSSQL), and nuked my old blog code and installed the latest (v1.4.3). Then after a little trial and error with the database, I got it all back running. In doing so, I had lost the mods I had made to the old design, so I am using this one as a starting point. I like the layout, but not a big fan of the blue, so on my to-do list now is a revaming of the color scheme.

Now that I have CF9 on here, I'm looking forward to some big things in 2010. It will get even better when my day job finally gets out of the Stone Age and gets up up from CFMX7 to CF9 in a few months! It feels like being caged when there's so much that you either cannot do, or have to jump through so many hoops that it's more cost-effective to wait for the CF9 cavalry to arrive.

No, this time it's not a new physical address (though Lord knows I've had enough of those recently). It's a new home for all my web sites. I now own my own virtual private server (VPS) with Viviotech.

After a truly disastrous trial with a VPS with Gearworx (I loved the VPS concept, Gearworx was awful. They have earned their "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau for sure), I moved back to a shared server with HostNexus. At first things were good. The price was a little steep for a shared server (meaning I am sharing space and resources with literally hundreds of other sites) but the setup was good, at least at first. Then, over the last month, a variety of things began to go bad. First, they began removing customization access rights from us (under the veil of security, I can't argue with that but it's not what I signed up for), then their network began to slow down big time, it's still suffering as far as I can tell. That led to their administrative console becoming almost useless because it was so slow, and finally one or more other domains on the shared servers started doing things to eat up so many resources that everyone else started timing out. Combine all that with tech support that, while extremely courteous, seemed to struggle sometimes to fix the more basic problems encountered, and I had to find a new home and fast.

Upon recommendations from several people in the ColdFusion community, I looked at Viviotech. For not much more than I was already paying, I could get back to having my own VPS. My server, my control, my setup. The only catch was that it was Linux-based. Not a big deal at all for my code, but it meant I had to convert my databases from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL 5. This, while adding to my task list, was also ot a big deal since I will have to be well versed in MySQL as part of my PHP development skill building.

So, I made the switch over the weekend to a CF8 VPS server (PHP is standard on Linux VPS so I can run both), and today got all but one of my sites set up. There were a few hiccups in the setup process, but Vivio's support staff was there quickly, and competently, and with little headache I got things taken care of. I am extremely happy. Happy enough that I am more than willing to place a banner for them on my blog.