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The Simpsons are moving to Paris!

I mean, this site, not the Simpsons.

I got a note in the mail that Gandi, our benevolent hosts, are closing up their only US datacenter by the end of the year. So I decided to move all my sites over to another datacenter, this one located in France. The lag between here and Paris doesn't look so bad, so I'll keep it as is for now, at least until it begins to be a problem.

While I was moving all the sites over I was investigating the possibility of using another hosting service. Gandi has very cheap rates, but you don't get a lot of utility for your bucks; this site is running on a basic PHP + Mysql host, with not a lot in the way of fancy new features. I have the option of creating a Node.js + MongoDB server, and I'll be doing so in the near future for a new project, but that's about it for fancy stuff on the budget I have.

I've also been checking out Amazon AWS, which is really great for hosting basic static HTML sites; you just create a "bucket" with your content in it, and Amazon can simply serve it up without having to spin up a whole new server. The first year of hosting is free, as well, so that's a good enticement to try it out.

I've also heard good things about Dreamhost and HostDuplex, which are used by friends and recommended. Digital Ocean is also very enticing; you can spin up servers or services on an as-needed basis, and it seems to be a decent alternative to Amazon's cloud services.

But as I said, right now the hosting on Gandi is the cheapest option, and the latency doesn't appear to be too terrible, so for now I'll stick with the basic. Eventually I will want the fancy, and that's when I will start looking at other hosts.

Oh, and also, this version of the Anchor CMS has been upgraded to the latest version. Anchor users, beware: you will probably need to run composer in your install directory to get it working. Details here.

This article is my 64th oldest. It is 357 words long