More Info Than You Wanted
Be warned - this post contains ten percent more than the daily recommended human dosage of technobabble. If you are pregnant or work in marketing, you may wish to avert your eyes. It revolves around my relocation of Hamfisted (this site, duh) from an air-conditioned cupboard at a hosting company's installation in the states, to a new air-conditioned cupboard at a hosting company in Australia. You probably didn't notice it, but your Hamfisted data packets are no longer burbling down from Pittsburgh. Instead they're bouncing and jiggling from Host Networks' data centre in Wickham Street, Brisbane. I've signed up on their cPanel AC-500 plan for $99 for three months, so we'll see how things work out. I can always switch somewhere else.
It was quite satisfying to nail the transfer first time around. As with most web stuff, there are many, many ways to do this sort of thing badly, leaving a site limping along without email, or without its site database, or with that bloody Apache welcome page up there, blazing like a badge of shame. This is what I do professionally, so one would expect me to be able to get it all right, but you can never really be sure. Particularly if there's some idiot who comes running in halfway through the process to tell me about a hidden mail server in Accounting that has mysteriously stopped working just a few minutes ago. There were a few code bits I needed to massage a little bit, like timezone settings and quote handling, but that was all fairly simple and didn't require any pathetic pleading emails to anyone.
The best thing about the change is that checking my email is now basically instantaneous. On my old hosting, the process was painful: Check mail... authenticating... logging in... downloading... downloading... processing junk... closing connection... done. Now it's Check mailDONE. Blammo. Go and read a book or something. This may not save me a lot of actual time, but it makes me feel like I'm moving faster, which is cool. I've also turned off any spam protection for my email account, just to see how bad things really are. SpamAssassin and a couple other anti-spam systems are available, so if I begin to founder in the torrent of penis enlargement and viagra ads, I'll be firing that puppy up quick smart. My Thunderbird client already does decent junk mail management on its own, but it may become necessary to dam the flood further up the river, so to speak.
For me and everyone else in Australia, the site is now a lot faster. For everyone else in the world, it's almost certainly slower. I'm kinda curious how much slower it is, but details like that are probably akin to graphing changes in your underwear elasticity over a two year period, so I'll probably just let it go.