My beloved web hosting co-operative Ouvaton has just come out of a five-days spell of technical difficulties. (This is what kept me from posting here more regularly.) The current hosting solution, VHFFS, while built on some very interesting concepts, is not very easy to understand and our maintenance partner, Azuria, is bent on both cutting corners and fixing architectural issues.
The set of test machines that will allow us to validate our new hosting suite, Hostflow and put it in production, is almost ready (we’re only missing our reverse DNS and one of the 5 machines). We’ll thus soon be happily testing away, and I still hope to hold the March 1 deadline for the opening of the new platform to new users and the start of the migration of current users.
Among the exhausting and fastidious activities this implies, I’ve learned a few things: the more you understand of what’s going on, the better you are at deciding what you need and getting it done. Actually putting your “trust” in a provider’s care, when in fact you’re just admitting your incompetence, is simply a foolish thing to do.
Another point: co-presence, physical proximity helps in getting your point accross. It’s not that you can actually say more over the phone, or that you can bodily threaten people when you see them, but the larger bandwidth seems to help impressing more of your point unto the other person.
A pretty annoying combination in our case: Renaud is now sharing my desk in Amsterdam 500km away from the machines, Alexis is only 250km closer, Yann (who knows the most) has got a day job that takes him quite a bit of energy and even more time, and once your platform is offline, your 3000 clients are angry (or, say, 300 of those are), and the 5500 sites are actually down, every minute until the problem is fixed.
It is now, and I hope it will stay put until we’ve migrated.