BARRfbag

So I am about to begin migration for my company from host “A” to host “B”. This is not a co-lo setup, we are moving to a fully managed hosting environment. During this process (which began months ago) I’ve found a lack of documentation around migrating between hosting vendors. I found this surprising (unless I’m just not looking in the right places) considering that our setup is fairly common. Dozens of websites, a handful of 3rd party developers and of course, a handful of various server configurations dependent upon the application running on it. I have, however, found that certain small companies specialize in specific aspects of a hosting move, such as ensuring that all of your SQL DB’s are properly transferred and fully accounted for. But I have found no one that looks at the big picture.

I’m fully willing, able and have the staff in place to manage the migration in house (which is the road I’ve chosen) , but it would be reassuring to find a ‘checklist’ of sorts that confirms that we have thoroughly thought through all of the facets of the move. Would love to know if anyone has come across this sort of thing.

If all goes well - and I’m confident that it will - maybe I’ll post the list here if there is any interest…

I haven’t posted for a few days because I spent a little time in the very sunny, very warm, somewhat rural, Destin, Florida. Even though this was a short vacation, I still felt the need to get online. Unfortunately, a high speed wireless or wired connection (or any speed for that matter) was simply unavailable at the condo where I was staying. And in my 2007 mentality of having an always-on or always available high-speed internet connection at the ready practically anywhere I go, I believed that meant I was instantly powerless to get connected. Until my sis-in-law said ‘why don’t you just dial up?’ Duh.

It has been what feels like eons since I have used dialup to get online. But in my need for my internet fix, I didn’t hesitate to unplug the (completely unused) landline and plug in my modem (and pray that the driver for it was installed). It felt like eons waiting for sites as simple as my gmail account to load. Made me wonder what percentage of the online community is still utilizing dialup. An article over at Computerworld estimates that about 60 million Americans live in rural areas that don’t even have the option to purchase a high speed connection. This doesn’t even take into consideration the number of people that have the access to a broadband or DSL connection, but simply choose to not upgrade either because of cost, or due to their feeling that they don’t need it.

Although this may not specifically relate to web ops in the sense of technical operations, I became curious (partially because I am managing the redesign of one new website) and so I ran a few reports at my current job just see exactly how many visitors we receive that are utilizing dialup (as believed by the analytics tool we use). The total is roughly 10%. Considering the millions of uniques that we see each month, that is a surprisingly high number to me and could certainly have some impact to potential revenues. I’m curious what others out there see in the sites that they manage just for comparison…

I’ve managed to stumble upon at least one other blog that seems to have some content related to what I’ve started looking for - which, as you may have read in my first post - is to find others responsible for web operations. I’ll have to add Kitchen Soap to what I hope will be a quickly expanding list of blogs similar to mine.

I also learned recently about the Web 2.0 summit coming this October. I’ve requested my invite, but no luck as of yet. Anyone been to this in the past? Given the speaker list, I would think this would be worth the trip cross-country to attend.

So, I’m a n00b. Up until now, I’ve never had a reason or believed that there was a purpose for me to start a blog. Let’s face it, who would really want to read about what some unknown yoyo has to say? A recent change in jobs has prompted me to revisit this decision and I have come up with what I think are 2 valid reasons for me to start blogging:

1. I’m responsible for Web Ops for an online travel company. As I’m sure oodles of people are well aware, there are more travel blogs around the web than you can shake a passport at. I think it is worthwhile for me to understand more about participating in blogging culture in order to transfer this experience to my current job responsibilities.

2. Again, I am responsible for Web Operations. In the last month or so, I’ve come to realize that there aren’t a lot of Web Ops specific blogs / sites / conferences around, that don’t focus primarily around programming or setting up the most kick ass Apache server (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). But I would like to see if this blog can essentially tap into a what I would think is an existing pool of people in a position similar to mine that are looking to share and promote thoughts, ideas and information about running their respective companies website operations - more from an infrastructure planning and day to day management perspective rather than hands on coder and sysadmin.

So that’s it. My first blog post on my first blog. Whew…