I will admit - I have been busy of late, mostly with system maintenance, and moving house.

Moving House

Moving house after getting well dug-in somewhere is a difficult process. We are having to deal with banks and Estate Agents (are search for the new place is almost over). I am also facing the prospect of getting everything moved and packed. Now although we have until may - it is only by seeing the sheer amount of stuff we have that you would appreciate how awkward its going to be.

I have been ruthlessly throwing stuff away, giving stuff to charity and selling stuff on eBay in an effort to cut it down. However - I am not selling any Lego - I consider it far too valuable for that!

Changing Hosting

I have also up and moved http://orionrobots.co.uk to a new hosting site. We are now hosted by Pipex Webfusion. It has been a little difficult technically but I have no problems with their service. I am still getting to grips with the idea of having the site on a machine that I don’t have absolute power over but the ups outweigh the downs.

The cons are:

• I must pay for the service - but the rate is affordable.
• I don’t have as much control - but this is something I can deal with.
• I wont be able to copy over old emails in imap accounts (sorry!) - but they will still be available on serverus.orionrobots.co.uk for those who want them.
• Due to mysql packet restrictions - I have had to move Steve Hassenplugs movies outside of the site.
• A couple of days of set-up

The pros:

• I can turn off the dusty old server and its paraphernalia taking up a substantial part of our lounge - and redistribute or sell its parts.
• I don’t have to worry about keeping the UPS serviced.
• I don’t have to worry about backups so often (the hosting service is backed up!)
• I don’t have to think about network faults at e7even (I do NOT recommend this company for any purposes) or my routers/network causing issues.
• I can have about 3 or 4 electrical sockets back
• My wife has room to put her computer in the lounge
• I don’t have to cart the whole server to the new house(BIG bonus)
• I don’t have to worry about the few weeks it will take for broadband to sort itself out (I was considering leaving the server at a friends place for a few weeks)
• Having more bandwidth on the host site than on my poor ADSL upstream.

And so on.. I can quite easily say that it makes a lot of sense and one major win from a lot of the not worries is having more time to write and create content for the site!