Hey all,
a little history of biffsocko.com –
The site started in the late 1990’s. I was working as a consultant (part-time) for the Nassau County Library System. It wasn’t long after I started, that I commandeered an old Sun Sparc 5 that wasn’t being used for anything and made the first iteration of biffsocko.com. It wasn’t fancy – web pages back then were just done in HTML written by hand, and it was just a fun project for me. That first version got destroyed when I accidentally overwrote the files. I quickly re-created the site with some fancy new graphics. I was able to fine a copy of it at the wayback machine (internet archive site) here.
Well, all good things come to an end. After about 11 years, my contract ended at Nassau Library Systems in 2007. I picked up an account at SDF and since they supported wordpress, I moved my site there. Here is my first post from SDF. SDF is a shared old-timey UNIX resource with multiple (hundreds) users. I love SDF, and will always keep an account there, and I’ll use it for other things, but it was finally time to move on. Since it’s a huge shared environment, I was sharing the server with hundreds of other people, and I didn’t have administrative rights. I was basically at the mercy of the sysadmin at SDF. He’s a very competent guy, but nevertheless, it could be frustrating. As I’ve said, SDF is old-timey. Over the years, virtualization and hosting on virtual hosts has sprung up. I resisted for a long time, but I finally caved. Biffsocko.com has been moved to Digital Ocean for hosting.
I could no longer ignore the fact that it was not only cheaper, but more importantly, I was able to run the host as the root user. I’m no longer reliant on others to fix things for me. As a Systems Administrator myself, it’s incredibly frustrating to have to wait for someone else to do something you know would only take a few seconds. It took a few days to get the site up on the new server, to upgrade wordpress and get to get everything configured and working
Here’s hoping biffsocko.com runs reliably on its new service. Godspeed
