11 years at Linode and goodbye

At some point in 1995 I added an HTML public hosting option to one of my Unix accounts at UC Berkeley, where I learned to write CGI perl scripts, write data to MySQL and BerkeleyDB, update my blog via email and procmail, lay out web pages with tables, and generally waste time. Graduation came and went, and they never kicked me off the server. Inspired by Gene Kan's Infrasearch, I wrote a news meta-search tool at TechOrgy.com (I don't own it any more!) so I could keep track of what the competition was doing during my first job .

About ten years after adding web capabilities to my on campus account, in March 2005, I finally moved my publichtml directory off campus and onto a little $40 Linode. I think I first heaed about them on Slashdot. I wanted to finally play with modperl and that meant I needed root. A year later, my records show, I upgraded to the $60 model. That would have been right around the time I was getting into Rails. Among the many little tools I've deployed to my server was a comments monitor, which would give me a desktop alert every time someone posted a comment on one of my Gawker.com articles (I was writing ~10 a day at one point) and which displayed a reverse-chron river of comments I could moderate. There was also the HTML for my restaurant business blog (now frozen in time) sfcovers.com, which indirectly helped me get the Gawker job. And a "reporter's dashboard" where I could take notes and search them with Plucene, a Perl port of Lucene.

More recently I've been using my Linode to develop a few more personal projects, mostly in Ruby, although still somewhat in Perl.

Anyway, I'm moving on to my own dedicated server, in Germany of all places. About 15 minutes ago I tailed my logs and decided it was safe to finally delete my Linode. The DNS seems fully updated.

I realize this little history is likely of interest only to me, but I felt like I should leave a marker here, to tell one story of one person who used Linode for a relatively long time. I used to joke that I spent more on web hosting than my car, but $7680 later, it's actually true.

Thank you caker for setting up this operation. I can't think of a single time uptime was an issue for me, when typing "ssh ryantate[at sign]ryantate.com" didn't work almost instantly. Good luck going forward. Maybe work on improving security a bit. :-) I'm sure in that regard and many others Linode will continue to improve. It always has, after all.

Warm regards,

R