So I've tried to think of things I've been asked more than once. And one is the title there: everybody and his brother Simon, King of the Witches, has a website or blog or whatnot that they own. Their own domain, their own corner of the Web. Do you need one too?

The answer is honestly probably not. But the main question you need to ask yourself is: what are you trying to accomplish?

Most people just want a place so that they too can be heard. Read. Whatever. If you just feel like blogging about your cat, then perhaps you don't really need your own site. You might be fine with using your Facebook account, or even that old standby LiveJournal or just going and getting a mycatrocksyourface.whatever.com at some place like Wordpress.com.

Seriously. They're free, there's no infrastructure for you to support, and your cat's three fans can read up on its latest adventures and whatever you dressed it in this week.

[[ Continued ]]

All right, here's the debrief.

As I mentioned previously, we moved to the Dreamhost PS virtual private server thing. Unfortunately, we were getting clobbered by something somewhere that was keeping us from even getting to the site via the Web. FTP was fine, though.

Now, as to what actually happened, I have no idea. The two theories offered up by Dreamhost technical support were that we were getting hit by some bots that we had previously been shielded from on the shared hosting and/or some bot was creating some sort of endless loop that was making our PHP processes inflate to bursting.

(more…)

If you're reading this, then either the One Tusk Pantheon is back online or you got really fucking lucky. We're in the middle of some sort of shitstorm that I don't even understand. Here, join me in a tour of my misery:

So we are now on a virtual private server on Dreamhost. Basically, for those who don't know–and you're happier not knowing, just trust me on this–I'll put this as simply as I can.

Let's think about this like a train.

(more…)