It has been a bit quiet round here lately partly due to pressures of work but also because I have been making a few changes.
Back in January 2008 I wrote about the fact that I had accumulated 15 domains. The last time I checked (2 minutes ago) this was up to 30. Some are dormant but the vast majority have web sites associated with them spread over a number of providers. This was becoming a time consuming and costly exercise to manage them all. So I decided to do something about it. I rented a dedicated server.
With the help from my colleague James I have been able to get it setup and get everything installed that I need (Perl, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin etc). As part of the package I went for it came with Webmin to manage the server and I have been very impressed with how easy it has made the process.
A concern that I have, now I have responsibility for a whole server, is security. I have had problems with people hacking into my sites in the past and so I am going to be spending a bit of time in the next few weeks hardening the server to keep the b*****rds out! So if the site goes down you will know I have failed!