Saying goodbye to iPage

My webhosting service finally expired today, I paid about $50 for a year's subscription at www.ipage.com. It was fun to start off with, but in the end, the server that I would eventually try out putting on wordpress installations onto were way too slow for my liking. Considering that my renewal fees would jump to $100 after the first year, I decided against renewing my account.

In addition, I thought that iPage's renewal e-mail messages were sleazy, warning that my payments were "overdue" and warned that my account would be shut down; you guys have it wrong, I didn't like your slow servers and decided not to renew. As a saving grace, your customer support was decent. That's all that I could day.

I've since moved the one domain I had to a different registrar which I am happy with and have switched to using a headless computer that I bought for my serving needs. The computer is equipped with a i5 Core CPU from Intel and 8GB of ram. I had the whole thing put together for about $500. Compared to running a cloud server setup, having my own server is far more cheaper and easier to learn on.

I have since migrated some test installations of wordpress to the new server and playing around with mapping the domain name to my home computer, in addition to having scripts to automatically update my home address since I've got a dynamic IP. I've also finally figured out how to get the webserver to speak with back end code, meaning that I will be able to start putting together server side code to generate websites, which I am looking forward to doing.

There are some back end stacks that I'll be needing to learn, but with the advent of html5, there are a lot of cool things that I can do programatically do instead of doing things in a graphics editor, one of which is automatically generating beautiful buttons, tables and themes for websites. With the advent of webGL as well, making interesting web based interactive applications would be quite interesting as well.

One other thing, I've noticed how important learning good terminal based text editors since I've found myself interacting with code on the server while on the go. I've been picking up emacs recently and though learning new keybindings and how things work was a little annoying at first, I am starting to get a hang of it. Eventually, I'll have some applications out for the web in the coming months and if I have enough traffic to warrant it, I may consider moving to a cloud solution.