I’ve been aware of the frenetic activity around Twitter for at least a year now, but I refuse to use it, both because it’s hard for me to see the value of 140 character text messages and because centralized Internet services leave a bad taste in my mouth. Such is the extent of my aversion that I limped along with my own PostFix/Courier-IMAP mail system with shitty webmail clients like SquirrelMail for years before my time in Iraq convinced me there’s simply no open-source email system remotely competitive with Gmail. When I switched my domain over to Google Apps for Domains, it was with a strong sense of shame, as though I’d been beaten in some epic contest.

The difference, of course, is that I desperately need stable, performant, spam-free, accessible email. I do not desperately need Twitter.

However, I am interested in the concept, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe all those millions of Twitter fans are all wrong.

The hosting provider for apocryph.org, DreamHost, is experiencing a serious outage that has resulted in apocryph.org sucking serious wind and/or being completely offline. DH’s latest claim is a fix from their storage vendor will cure all ills, but this has been going on for a week now so it’s hard to imagine a QFE from a vendor will just make it vanish.

Anyway, I probably brought this down upon myself, since I went from fairly-cheap-but-still-shitty CI Host to considerably-cheaper DreamHost, based on the promise of ridiculous expanses of disk space and lavish transfer quotas.

Now that I’m decommissioning my colo box at CI Host, I finally have to move my SVN server over to my Dreamhost account. I tried back in February when I moved everything else over to Dreamhost but I couldn’t get it to work. I tried again this time around and had better luck.

If you’re reading this, I’ve successfully transferred apocryph.org to DreamHost from CI Host. I pay about one fourth of what CI Host was charging me, and I get sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground (note to CI Host: your security and DNS guys are utter fuckwits).

Currently I pay $588/yr ($50/mo) for 1U colo services with CI Host. The box I have in their colo facility has 250GB of storage, and a handful of VMs running apocryph.org and a few other things. It hosts my expansive image gallery, a few databases, etc.