Here’s the quick news for my non-geek music fans: I’ve redesigned jamesnotjim.com. The new version includes RSS feeds (so you can keep track of it via Bloglines or whatever other feed reader you prefer). The new version also includes a handy flash-based player so you can play James, Not Jim music right from your browser–no need to download it or trip over to our MySpace page (we know some of you hate MySpace, and we understand why. We also know that some of you probably browse from places where it’s blocked.
Here’s are the long-winded reasons behind the redesign, for you web geeks: As you know, debates about the best hosting providers often take a form similar to those about Ford vs Chevy, Coke vs Pepsi, or vi vs Emacs. Wheatdesign.com is currently hosted with mediatemple.net. I’ve been with (mt) for over a year and, in terms of stability and customer support, they’re quite amazing. Where they lack is in the resources-to-price ratio. Part of this is necessary for stability and security: by limiting what you can do, mediatemple keeps their uptime numbers high. That’s a good thing, especially for my community site, bassplaying.com, which I started in part because one of my favorite bass community sites had terrible stability issues.
The Chevy to mediatemple’s Ford is dreamhost.com. If mediatemple is a carefully planned urban community, dreamhost is a frontier town in the wild west. Dreamhost has had a lot of trouble with uptime, but they give you an insane amount of resources for almost nothing. They’ll also let you run just about anything you like (e.g. mediatemple won’t let me run CVS repositories, Dreamhost will. Mediatemple had, until very recently, PHP “safe mode” restrictions in place. Dreamhost never did).
I’m a fairly loyal customer, but mediatemple’s recent upgrades left me a little cold. They had been promising Ruby on Rails. Now they’ve delivered it–if you’re willing to upgrade or pay for it as an add-on (it’s included over at Dreamhost). They’re also requiring existing customers to go through an upgrade process that’s going to cost each of us some time changing database host names and such. That’s unavoidable, and they’ve done a good job of automating the transition as much as possible. But it’s still time I’ll have to spend mucking with my site that I’d rather spend building cool things.
I found a deep-discount code that gave me a year of hosting at DH for the price of two months with mediatemple (email me if you want it). So I decided I’m in the perfect position to check out both sides. And, going forward, I may keep both hosts: one for rock solid stability and great support, the other for ample space, few restrictions, and Ruby development. Or, if it turns out that I prefer the wild west to the suburbs, I’ll switch. All in good time. I have a year to evaluate.
So the redesign of jamesnotjim.com was actually driven by the hosting switch. I needed to host at least one site with DH in order to test it out, but I needed it to be a fairly low-traffic site that could go down without causing problems. So I moved jamesnotjim over to DH. Everything else is still with (mt). And, since DH had WordPress as a one-click install, I decided to try out the competition there as well (no worries, Josh, wheatdesign.com is still rolling on wheatblog, and I have no plans to use anything else). So I have a new host and a new CMS for one of my sites. And I’m sure I’ll have more to say about both.