The invisible movers are sweaty and deserve a pizza
While this blog's spiritual home has always been Evanston, the blog hasn't physically lived there in eight years. After graduation, the blog took up a spot with Cornerhost, an Atlanta-based hosting provider.
Lindsay was the one who found Cornerhost. Evan Williams, then co-founder of Blogger, used and recommended it. The man running it gave discounts to Americorps kids like Lindsay, after having served himself.
Knowing a real, reachable, nonprofit-friendly person was behind things was more than enough to sign me up. I'd searched the Web then and found thousands of useless or fake hosting reviews. Cornerhost was better than that. Lindsay and I briefly considered sharing an account.
I went through the same search this week. In intervening years, Evan Williams had left Blogger to co-found Twitter; Lindsay and I had broken up over and over again; and the thousands of useless or fake hosting reviews had turned into millions. So, once again, my search turned to real people. WordPress had host recommendations, and among them was Laughing Squid. The hosting plans were cheap and cloud-based. Maybe more importantly, they didn't advertise or have review carpets.
The company was full of real people who were active in San Francisco digital culture. The people considered the company's central mission to be supporting the arts. Sold. Cornerhost was still reliable and cheap, but I wanted to try something new. (Good year for that, it seemed.)
The shift this week went relatively smoothly. Moving 4,000-some blog posts and 2,000 comments was more drama than I'd anticipated, but the data eventually got to a new home. Laughing Squid's support was pleasant and efficient, manually moving the database when it was too big to import automatically. And the tech support person used his real first and last names! I then made some plugin hacks to get WordPress working again and used a find-and-replace plugin to fix quickly a few thousand special characters that had exploded in the packing peanuts.
Currently, Cornerhost keeps data in Houston, Laughing Squid in Dallas. So, the moving trucks this week have driven virtually from Houston to Virginia to Dallas. Crazy. But now we're here and happy to be here.
Update: Shortly after this post, Laughing Squid introduced me to Cee-Lo Green's future party-song F**K YOU. Not bad for a hosting provider.
