Not that anyone will notice, but this site has been migrated away from Media Temple’s grid server to a small VPS. If you’ve ever tried to run a Drupal site on “the grid”, I’m pretty sure you know why I’ve moved. Media Temple’s mysql performance, unless you purchase a “mysql container”, is dismal at best. This site, which was running pretty bare-bones as far Drupal module usage goes, was taking up to four seconds for each page to load when logged in since the database queries took a horrendously long time. I’d been on Media Temple since way back (when they still offered old-school shared hosting), and I think I was much more pleased with the service/performance/price level then, and have been just suffering through things silently as they’ve segued into “the grid”.
For the last few years, I’ve been charged with the development of my work company’s site which is hosted on a similar VPS setup that I’m currently on, and it’s really been a fun learning experience working a lot more in depth with the entire LAMP stack (and Drupal), rather than just hacking away at a Wordpress or Movable Type installation on my own site. Despite knowing that moving to a different shared hosting solution would be more economical, having root access with the ability to tweak my own server configuration seemed a lot “funner”, and a little more “hobby-like” than just plopping the site down on shared server, and wishing I had the choice to run PHP as an Apache module or as FASTcgi.
I think that a part of me also thought that if I plopped down bigger bucks for hosting, then I would feel more obligated to keep the site, and everything entailed in it a little more up to date. We’ll see. If I was a cobbler, and this site were my son, he would not only be barefoot, but he would probably have lost his feet (or legs for that matter) to some horrible infection.
(Edit: Also, since the DNS caches have been updated since the move the amount of SPAM to my inbox has dropped to about nothing. Thank goodness for being able to set spamassassin to be super aggressive.)