Evan Brassart

A few days ago I was stumbling around the web and came across an excellent design firm Ordered List. They do some really nice work! Anyways, back to my story, from the ordered list site I checked out their client SliceHost.

Since I started my blog, I’ve spent more time bouncing around hosts than writing posts. Heh that rhymed. I started with mediatemple, moved to hostgator, and have finally landed on SliceHost. MediaTemple and Hostgator are decent shared hosting solutions, but just can’t compare with the value I get from full root access to a computer on a public IP. Instead of fighting with cpanel, whm, and mediatemple’s slightly better proprietary hosting control systems, I can now set up my own servers (litespeed, php5 through lsapi, and mysql5) without having to put up with the learning curve of crappy hosting control systems.

I admit, for most people running your own server is way to complex, but hear me out. If you spend half the time learning about unix server administration as you would learning, using, and fighting shared hosting, you could have your own server. You’ll even gain some very marketable knowledge to boot!

I am moving my wordpress blog and creating a new magento shopping cart on my SliceHost “shop”. Until I am ready to go live with my new shop I am going to use the 256mb slice from SliceHost. I get full root access to an Ubuntu 8.04 virtual server with guaranteed cpu, 256mb ram, 10GB raid protected fast hard disc, and 100GB of bandwidth.

Posts comming up!

• Magento Shopping Cart on Litespeed - Smoking Apache
• My Shop on SliceHost

I don’t frequently rant and rave about new products or services, but during the past three weeks I’ve been using Mozy, specifically MozyHome Free, and I don’t know how I lived without it.

Mozy is an online backup solution startup company under EMC. At my workplace we currently use an EMC product for our backup solution so I figured I would give Mozy a try.

You can give Mozy a try here. Let me know what you think! To get to the free version click “Mozy Home” then there will be an icon in the left pane to get to Mozy Free.

I have never found a more simple and efficient way of backing up my important documents than Mozy. The free version of Mozy gives me 2GB of secure remote storage and a 1mbps connection to their servers. After installing the Mozy software I configured it to backup my email, bookmarks, office documents, and pictures. All of this took less than 2 minutes with Mozy’s intuitive user interface.

The first backup does take some time, but Mozy will wait for you to be away from your computer before doing any uploading. All of your data is encrypted before it leaves your machine so security is a non-issue. After your initial large backup is completed, backups will only take a few minutes to run. Mozy is smart, it will only backup data that has been modified since the last backup instance.

Mozy is the best solution for mobile professionals, students, and your parents computer; you just can’t beat free!

Check back soon, I will cover more about mozy with some screenshots of it in action.