For a few days I had no access to some of my web sites, this on account of some DNS snafu events that had me scratching my head. Things look close to normal now as I continue the laborious process of slinging hundreds of gigabytes of content across the Internet. I’ve been moving my sites from one dedicated server and one VPS to a single dedicated server at a data center in Canada. I asked for a dedicated server in New York City but none were available, so I took what I could get in North America. OVH.com is the company where I hope my digital public life resides for years to come.

I had been with OLM.net for about 20 years, and with Digital Ocean for only about 2 years. How this business has changed. For about 40% less money per month I’m moving to a box that has eight times the RAM and almost triple the hard drive storage that I had before. Setup of the new dedicated server was done within hours. In the past that could take days. Customer support has been OK, not as instantaneous as some sources made it sound, but I’ll cut them some slack since my inquiries came in during the holiday season and on weekends.

I feel a little misled about some things (the above-mentioned DNS confusion could have been easily avoided) but all in all the new company looks like a winner. It is a little like I am going to the dark side with these guys. Over the years I’ve seen no end to the garbage and drone web traffic coming from their data centers around the world. I guess when you’re that big a hosting company it’s inevitable that malware would be hosted there. I saw similar garbage traffic from Digital Ocean, where one of my sites was previously hosted.

OVH made headlines a while back for hosting Wikileaks, a development which apparently took them by surprise. I have no opinion on Wikileaks or their other customers, including those malware drones that have picked at my web sites over the years.

I seem to remember seeing mention that certain of the 9/11 hijackers had connections to web servers in Trumbull, Connecticut. The data center was never identified by name but I always wondered if it wasn’t OLM, the company I was with for 20 years and which is located in Trumbull. Being in the same data center as the bad guys is kinda like being buried in the same cemetery as mafia figures or presidential assassins. If the cemetery and its management are stigmatized for allowing such burials then I can’t imagine anyone passing that disparagement on to anyone else buried there — or to their survivors.

Hah, leave it to me to conjure connections among Wikileaks, 9/11, data centers, and cemeteries.