{"id":124,"date":"2010-06-18T13:34:12","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T20:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vernon.mauery.com\/content\/?p=124"},"modified":"2010-06-18T13:34:12","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T20:34:12","slug":"server-tinkering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vernon.mauery.com\/content\/2010\/06\/18\/server-tinkering\/","title":{"rendered":"Server Tinkering"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was born to tinker. I think this must be the opposite of the optimizer. I see a project in anything that I could tweak to make it a little better. This not only applies to computers, which are the easiest thing to tinker with, but food, DIY projects, and more. This particular post is centered a little more around computer tinkering, just as a warning to the technophobes.<\/p>\n

My host for the past 2+ years for this server has been Site5<\/a>. They have been adequate. I had never used a Web Hosting Service<\/i> before so this was a whole new experience. Moving there from a private server took a lot of tweaking. Server wise, they were pretty good. I think my site got its fair share of the server pie, but it is not a really demanding site. Service wise (meaning the people), I think they only get 4 out of 5 stars. Whenever I had a problem, they did finally resolve it, but it took some work and push-back from me to make it happen. Usually the first contact would try to blow me off. I would patiently explain that they were contractually obligated to fix the problem and then ‘level 2’ support would fix it. I could deal with this if they had all the features I wanted, but I wanted more. Sure, they have ‘unlimited’ disk space (as long as you don’t use it), and unlimited bandwidth, which with my vast sea of devoted readers, I don’t really need. But what I do need is IPv6. And they have no plans for that (at least I am privy to none).<\/p>\n

So I jumped ship. The market for dual stack hosting is not yet very big so there really aren’t that many service providers yet. I finally found BurstNET®<\/a>, which seemed to offer IPv6 as well as very low-priced VPS (Virtual Private Server). So low, in fact that I could get a whole VPS for less than I was paying at Site5. That’s very cool. Being a tinkerer, I really need w00t. Still, since BurstNET uses OpenVZ<\/a> technology instead of Xen<\/a> or KVM<\/a>, I don’t quite have complete control over everything. I don’t get to configure my network, for instance. But I do have two static IPv4 IP addresses; doing my part to reduce the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses. And after a quick service request, they granted me two IPv6 addresses. Yes, only two, not an entire subnet. I thought that was odd, but hey, at least it is something. Their service department has been nothing but good. I have made several requests for help:<\/p>\n