Finally, after almost five years of being hosted on a server in my closet, Good Omens is getting a real server!

What does this mean?

  • Security: Dreamhost isn’t likely to be hacked several times a year, as I have become accustomed to, so I can re-enable some functions such as user account creation and comments.
  • Speed: 384k upload speeds on myside have always hurt the site, especially when I’ve tried to deliver media content. Woot for pages loading faster.
  • Availability: Power goes out at my house. I install some new spam filter app that crashes IIS. MySQL Service gets hacked. My print queue jams up so bad I need to restart the server. What did these all have in common? They all meant the site was down, sometimes for hours, until I could get my server back up and running. Less of those issues on Dreamhost.
  • Forum: Hardly used before and now that comments are re-enabled, even less useful, so it’s going away.
  • Greener: Soon (once I get some other business of it) I’ll have one less box sucking up power 24/7
  • Paying the bills: Now instead of just paying once a year for the domain registration and the site using up a certain about of my DSL bandwidth and electricity (which I could never accurately estimate the cost of), I’ve got a fixed monthly bill for hosting. Because of that and the other expenses behind good omens (buying Swag, putting on Good Omens Con, etc), I’m going to put up a PayPal Donate button.