I have just moved away from the linux server and the company CIHost that my websites and the websites of my customers were on since 2001. At that time, for $99 a month, I had the independence and enough kung fu to manage multiple web sites with a new and fairly secure technology. At times I even made enough money to break even and even profit from it. After enduring one upgrade with that company and because of my ignorance, suffering from their benign neglect, I found that my own web site, olena.com had been cracked and was being used as a platform to send spam. Shortly before that, I had recognized that some spammer was watching over my shoulder. One of my sites, was getting a lot of spam from an email address that was not used publicly. The email that was forwarding to that address was the public one. So I changed it to something else. Within an hour I was receiving spam from that changed internal address. So I worried, but set my worries aside.

Here was my problem. I just didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing or learning more in order to keep that cash flow going. I have loyal customers, and I could still serve their needs without going much further with managing the server. But I got tired of receiving over 1000 spam emails a day.

So I went hunting, and decided to move all the web sites to a single host though not to another dedicated server. This blog is now on that server. The technology is better (newer), and the support is OK, even though there are some rules the host doesn’t mention for people who buy multiple sites. That’s OK. The server is faster, the controls are more powerful, the possibilities for developing interesting sites is really pretty good.