Rob's Ramblings

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.

For over a dozen years now I have been coding web applications using ColdFusion, from version 3 all the way through version 8. I love ColdFusion, and given the choice I would choose it over any of the other server languages. Unfortunately, the people who pay the people who employ me are forcing me to go another route. It's not offical yet, but at the very least the Department of Education is adding the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to it's preferred list of web development platforms, and I have heard opinions that it may displace ColdFusion in the future. So, in the interest of remaining gainfully employed, I am becoming a PHP developer over the next few months.

The trick of this is that I am going to have to become proficient on my own time, they won't pay me to do this. So I am going to have to use my personal projects as training grounds for PHP. I have some work that I need to finish that I am going to keep in ColdFusion, and I am not going to rewrite sites in PHP, but new tasks on existing sites, and new sites, are going to be done primarily in PHP for the short run.

To aid me in my learning process, I will be using this blog as a brain dump to note what I like, don't like, and struggle with as I go about learning PHP.

And the winner is...

The network is good enough that I can comfortably keep this phone. But count me amongst the vast majority of iPhone users that will leave AT&T as soon as Verizon gets the iPhone someday. But that day is at least two years away and I am very happy that this worked out as well as it did. I really expected that A&T was going to be awful and not a useable option.