loudestnoise

So along with my move to Habari as my blogging platform, I also have recently changed web hosting companies. For the past five years I was hosted with Suprass Hosting company. I really can't complain about the service I received, and while I enjoyed the hosting plan and features I had with them, during my attempt to install Habari I ran into a few issues. The first issue being that I lacked the more current version of PHP. PHP being a web scripting language that is used by many popular blogging platforms. It turns out that Surpass did support the newer version I needed, and I only needed to edit a few things in order to have it enabled. The second issue I ran into was even more of a geeky issue that may or may not mean anything to you. I wanted the ability to use the subversion repository that allowed me access to the cutting edge version of Habari. To do so, I need to have the ability to update my installed version of Habari using the subversion updating features. Basically this means, I wanted the ability to update my installed version of Habari quickly, without having to download the most recent and then upload it to my site. To do this I needed a special access to my site that is called SSH. Again, this is rather geeky, but it involves using some command line skillz and apparently the hosting plan I had with Surpass did not give me the ability to do these things. This made me upset, so I sought out a new host. One that would give me the features I desired. Along came Slicehost. Well it didn't exactly come to me, but after hearing about it from a few people I decided to check it out. Slicehost is a Virtual Private Server hosting company that gives users the ability to have their own "virtual" server without paying the expense of a real dedicated server. Slicehost is quite cool in that they gave me the option of choosing which Linux distribution I wanted to install and beyond that, I had to make everything else work. I went with Ubuntu 8.04, being that I was at least a little more familiar with Ubuntu than other Linux distributions. After getting that set up I had to do cool and geeky things like installing Apache web server software, setting up the DNS settings for my domain and get Habari up and running. I didn't realize how fun having my own server would be. I'm learning a lot and hope to continue to learn more about such things. It took me a while to get everything configured and up and running, but once it was I had quite a sense of accomplishment, since I did all the work.