As I noted earlier, my web site got hacked. As a result, I decided to leave my old hosting company, PowerVPS.com, and find a new host. While another VPS would probably have managed, I know a woman in San Jose who runs a hosting company, simpli.biz, who offered me a good deal on a fast dedicated server. I'll grow into it, and in the meantime you should see much greater performance from my site.

I will make some final commentary on PowerVPS. I left for a variety of reasons, and they were certainly not 100% bad.

• They were on the other coast, so my ping times to them were 80ms or so. This was no fun for ssh and would have made running things on them impractical. I was surprised that most of the virtual hosting companies with good reputations and prices were not on the west coast.
• At first I looked for hosting in Canada. This was not simply because I was a Canadian. I thought it might be good to get hosting (in Vancouver) that was not subject to U.S. law. Not because I intend to break U.S. law, but being at the EFF we've been fighting some of these laws and it would be good to be on another level. And I'm Canadian. However, all the hosting offerings in Canada I tried that matched my parameters were much more expensive.
• VPSs are in general a great idea. However, it's hard to make them swap. That means each VPS duplicates in RAM a copy of apache and mysql and the rest, which is wasteful. Dedicated servers, which swap, allow the big programs that have a lot of pages which are rarely used to swap them out to disk, while the active programs get use of all of the ram. You can't overdo this, but it's pretty handy. One VPS provider, Iron Mountain, does what I have been advocating -- gives users access to a virtualized MySQL server on a fast machine, so you don't have to run your own. Doing this is rare.
• They would not support Ubuntu, only Centos. I am running Ubuntu on almost all my machines. I really like the idea that I can just duplicate efforts onto my hosting server, with now learning how to do things in a different distro. And that I can compile stuff at home and just move it to the web host. CentOS is the most popular distro in the hosting world, and people have done a lot of fancy things for it (control panels, automated installs etc.) and I understand why a company will decide to only support one distro. But that just means I go to a company that picked the distro I want.
• PowerVPS screwed up when most of their customers got hacked. The hack wasn't their fault, as far as I know, but once they realized so many of their customers were compromised, they should have E-mailed all of us immediately. Because they didn't, I only noticed the attack when they broke some of my scripts. My site redirected unsuspecting users to a frame which might have infected them, which I regret. I should have been told about this as soon as possible.
• The kicker: When I told them I wanted to replace my server after the hack, they said I had two options. I could back up the server (many gigs of data) and they would erase it and give me a new one with a fresh Centos 4. Then I could restore the files and rebuild everything, being down during the period I did this. Or I could buy a new server, transfer, and then move the DNS or the IP as desired. They would not temporarily give me the 2nd server, and then delete the old when I was ready. They said too many people took too long, and freaked out if deleted. Being forced to buy a new server simply sent me on a shopping trip. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why send your customers on a shopping trip?
• Another sin: When I went shopping, I looked at the list of special coupon offers various competitors offered. There I saw PowerVPS selling the same server I was paying $85 for for 30% off, lifetime discount. Be very careful when you offer new customers a much better price than existing customers get. I hate it, and I will leave you for it.

Now as I say, it was not all bad. Their support was good, and during the recent episode where I was on the digg.com homepage, they temporarily upgraded my VPS capacity -- which is one of the prime things a VPS can do that a dedicated server can't. I liked those things but the above mistakes lost a customer.

Let me know if you encounter any problems with the server move.

Updated note: After you change a server's IP, all users should switch to a new IP after the "time to live" on the past lookup expires, which in my case was set to about 3 hours. However, turns out many people have broken (or deliberately broken) software that retains stale records for much longer. The leading culprit right now are web spiders, including googlebot, which continue to hit the old address. Actual users doing so are rare. For E-mail, a previous move found that spammers continued to use the old addresses for months after the fact. They presumably kept DNS lookup data on their CD-ROMs, or didn't want to be subject to attempts to use DNS to block them, or had some other reason.