HCW Takes to the Skies!

If you are reading this, it means the nameservers have done their thing, and you are visiting HCW from its new home.

We have had several homes in our 10 year history – we were kicked off of Communitech.net at one point, because we used too much of their “unlimited” resources (their excuse was that we were hosting beta driver files from Nvidia and ATI). We have also been on other hosts that no longer exist, including Dell’s hosting service. Eventually we had to move to a dedicated server, and our first was RackShack (which again no longer exists in that form).

Most recently, we were hosted on a server co-located at NetNation. The server hardware itself was pretty basic – a Dell rack server with a Pentium Extreme single core, SATA Raptor hard drives, and 4GB of ram courtesy of OCZ. It has served us well for the last few years actually, with the exception of crashing hard when our Windows 7 vs Vista article made it to the front page of Digg.

The other thing I feared most was a hardware crash of some sort. This actually happened on an identical server I was using to host some of my other sites, and friends’ sites. The Raptor drive just came to a crashing halt, and the data could not be recovered. There was nothing to do but start from scratch, and import some data manually from Archive.org. If this happened to HCW, it would be an utter disaster.

Now that we’re being served from a cloud (Rackspace to be precise), I no longer have to worry about hard drive failures. I don’t have to worry about making sure there is room for backups and logs. And I don’t have to worry about the site crashing under Digg’s might.

So far the transition has gone as smooth as I could have hoped; let’s hope we don’t run into any issues in the next few days (knock on wood!)