Curse you Snow!

I know it's only march, but it's almost April as well! Curse you weather!

Migration complete!

I did not think that the migration which I started to undertake back in December would take this long to complete.  Nor be this painful.

All of my hosting originally was on Dreamhost.  That was fine - until you started to load multiple resources.  A photo here, a video there, and a blog post there combined with another photo.  It’s not their fault, its just the pains of shared hosting and I didn’t want to pay the extra premium to bump up to a dedicated hosting option each and every month. 

So back in December I started looking.  Looking for a way to allow me to keep and use Dreamhost(Im still a fan of them) as well as provide a little more flexibility as well as provide a way in which I didn’t have to update my software every few weeks(Wordpress - Im a fan but all of the security patches and updates recently have killed me when you try to manage multiple sites).

I know how to do everything on my end, and I don’t mind doing it for others.  But when maintenance takes up so much time that you can’t even dedicate any time to your own site to actually do anything with it.  Then it becomes a problem.

I’ve known about squarespace for a while due to listing to the twit network.  I know Leo is a fan so I took the plunge and tried a fourteen day trial.  I was in love.  No more security updates that I have to deal with, easy templates to work with, and it just works. They even have step by step instructions on what you need to do to get your own domain pointed to their site.  And once you do that, it just works.

So I figured out how I was going to do the blogging component.  That was one step.  The only downside(for me that I can see) at least for Squarespace was the little amount of storage you got with account before you had to jump plans or buy more storage(which I admit is not that expensive per month, but it does add up).  So what I did was I devised a plan to spread out the storage and bandwidth to other locations outside of Squarespace, and that is what took forever to figure out.

The video component of it was easy.  The videos could be hosted on a sub domain of randomizedharmony.com (media.randomizedharmony.com) back on Dreamhost.  They offer “unlimited” bandwidth and storage on their hosting plans - so that was easy enough to tackle.  Just had to configure the video players to point at the correct location and then all video was coming from the dreamhost systems.  This saved on my monthly Squarespace bandwidth meter as well as storage. 

Next up was photos.  This was not so easy.  I originally used Gallery2 on my Dreamhost server, but I had so many problems with that where the thumb nails would disappear the database would get corrupt or any other random issue which meant I had to reload the photos multiple times.  Also, applying updates was not always easy for that software.  I needed an easy to use system which also offered a lot of storage.  I like to upload my photos nice and large and a lot of them. I tend to take way more than I could ever view but I enjoy doing it — plus - I got a secret plan in the works which requires more space and organization. **Insert Evil Laughter Here**

So out to the web to start trying out photo sharing sites.  Sites dedicated to just photos.  It took a while, but eventually I landed on SmugMug.  For a few reasons.

1. You could point a domain to your smugmug page, so photo.randomizedharmony.com now brings you to my smugmug page
2. You can customize it just about as easily as you customize the Squarespace page
3. It just works
4. Its one yearly fee
5. Unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth

I was sold. 

So now, photos are being uploaded to smugmug and appear from that domain(photo.randomizedharmony.com) the videos from dreamhost(media.randomizedharmony.com) and the blog contents (and random iphone photo uploads) from squarespace(randomizedharmony.com).  This helps spread out the balance of everything I have so that its not all reliant on one particular system, but also puts as little strain as possible on each system while still being able to maintain all the media I have.  And since I do plan on becoming more media centric this year(again - my evil secret plan to rule the world) I needed something a little more flexible which delivered on a good price and speed and which reduced the amount of time I spent managing things.

So would I recommend this setup for someone else?  Not particularly.  A setup I would recommend for others might be for them to use Squarespace as their blogging/hosting company and smugmug pro account for their video and photo sharing(yes- smugmug pro does do video in their galleries, but I wanted a little more flexibility for the interaction with the blog and to come from a different domain for my specifications.  I do have to say that I will be making use of this in my secret project to come though)

It took a few months, but the migration is complete.  It took my this long to migrate all my email over to the randomizedharmony.com domain - but even like that - there might be something which I missed.  It happens, and when the 404 occurs, I’ll be sure to notice, groan, and then fix it.