For the first time in almost 7 years my servers are offline.

I just shut them down. It was pretty sad. They were good servers. They did a lot of traffic. They were slashdotted, dugg, reddited, and probably any other sited that was hot shit in the last 6 years.  I installed them when my dedicated host died in early 2001. Originally I just shipped them a box, which they hooked up. The original box was a VA Linux box from their fire sale. It owned. I paid 200 a month for unlimited transfer. At that time I was doing about 25G a day in transfer. heh. Then in 2003, I bought a bundle of hardware to upgrade my infrastructure and added a firewall, a super fast switch and another server. With all this fanciness I was able to pull an average of about 120G a day… for 3 years straight. Which I think is around 130 terabytes. I guess that is what i get for hosting shady content. ;)

So now I embark on a new style of hosting. A mix of hardware, shared and virtualized.  I have a box at leaseweb, a demo box at mediatemple (it is pretty dope), a bundle of stuff at mosso and then a handful of sites sprinkled around ec2. It makes me sad to not have full control of my sites. I am bummed that mosso doesn’t offer SSH. I am worried that my hosting cocktail will not handle my needs and that I will be hit with crazy overages. I can’t afford a 10k hosting bill. that would be annoying.

When i think how this hosting plan is how most people host stuff, I can’t imagine their pain. Through managing my own boxes, I learned SO much. I fought hackers (both brazillian and korean). I fought lawsuits. I fought clients and users. I learned how to manage load, how to scale php, how to work out kinks in a cheap infrastructure and all the fun tricks that got me to my job at threadless. But most of all I learned that I really love linux and open source software.

I will miss you servers! Peaces!