8 Ways to Sunday

…. deep in the heart of Texas! I’ve completed the move to TextDrive, and if you can read this then the domain name change has successfully propagated to your DNS server.

8 Ways to Sunday and Low Pass Filter now reside on “One,” the name for one of the two TextDrive servers housed in The Planet’s Dallas, TX data center. “One” has dual Xeon 3.06GHz processors (1MB Cache / 533MHz FSB), 6GB RAM, and four 73GB 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID 5 array (plus a fifth for backup). It has a twin named Barclay with equally impressive specs and performance to match. These two BSD-powered beasts are the workhorses of TextDrive, hosting the sites of the first 200 members (the so-called VC 200) and however many have joined up since the service kicked off early this month.

It’s been a big relief to make this move after the performance problems that had plagued my previous hosting provider. I’m grateful for all the help they provided to get me started almost a year ago, but it was time to move on. This site has grown up quite a bit since its inception. 8 Ways to Sunday now averages about 3,000 unique visitors and 75-80,000 hits per month since I started posting more useful, truly original content a few months ago. That’s nothing compared to the A-listers of the blogosphere, but it was enough of an increase for this tiny site that I needed a more robust hosting solution.

So far, I’m loving TextDrive. My hosting plan easily meets my current needs and leaves me with plenty of storage space (1GB) and bandwidth (10GB/month) to try new things. I’m not sure where I’ll go from here, but I’ve got a few good ideas. It all depends on how much spare time and energy I can muster. Stay tuned…