Welcome to the new and improved server for sailingfortuitous.com.
This should be fairly transparent, but if you’ve noticed anything weird over the last couple days or something isn’t working with the site, don’t panic. It may take a little while to discover everything that broke in the move and fix it, but this should be an improvement in performance and reliability going forward.
Like any displacement hull vessel, it doesn’t really take that much to power a boat log like this. The first generation of sailingfortuitous was hosted from our house on a sweet Pentium III 500 with 384MB of RAM, which was a decade old at the time and well past its prime. It did fine once I got Ubuntu running on it. I didn’t actually know how to set up a Linux server at the time, but I found a canned disk image that contained a pre-configured version of the entire software stack, and that got me going. In 2010 we moved it up to a hosted service to get it out of our house and hopefully gain some efficiency. Unfortunately, we chose our host based on the fact that it was the cheapest thing we could possibly find, and it showed. We were sharing a server with probably dozens (hundreds?) of other websites and there would be phases where our site would become slow or unresponsive, presumably when the rest of the spam engines and bot herders would get all wound up and consume all of the server’s resources.
As of right now, we’re on a virtual private server (VPS) through a well-respected hosting company. I am the boss of my virtual server and have guaranteed resources, including my own database and web server, and I expect that things will likely be better (hopefully proportionately to the price.)
This is probably an amazingly boring log entry, but hey, it’s the off season. We love having a chronicle of our trial-by-sailing and that’s definitely the primary purpose for the boat log, but I also get a lot out of the writing exercise and the technical fiddliness of it.
So as I wind up our server maintenance, our thoughts will soon be turning to boat maintenance. We’ve got some new equipment to install in April, so be on the lookout for some stupid power tool tricks. If you do see anything anomalous with the new and improved boat log, please let me know.
Hi,
I just came across your blog and am enjoying your writing very much. I sail out of Buzzards Bay up in Mass., and don’t know your sailing area, but your description of your cruise to Myers and your feeling after a good day out is universal to all of us. Those special days when everything comes together. Keep up the writing.
Hey Greg, thanks for checking it out.
Hopefully we’ll have some new entries soon as we start getting ready for sailing season.