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Saturday, September 17, 2005

Got To Move

Way back in 1997, when I created visitmalta.com for what was then the National Tourism Organisation of Malta, I started a relationship with a hosting company based in Florida called Web2010. Their service was excellent and their rates among the best in the world. Web2010 became the hosting company for MaltaMedia when we first went online in 1998.

Soon after that, Web2010 grew and eventually became a larger company with a new name. Billing happened in Texas, technical support came from Georgia or Florida, and some of the servers we used were hosted in California. Over the years I built an excellent working relationship with some of the company's employees. They have more important clients than MaltaMedia, but I was a good customer and they treated me well. Call it southern hospitality, call it good business, call it whatever you want, it was a good arrangement.

On the technical front, things didn't always go well. The MaltaMedia Online Network grew in size and scope within the first years of the new century, and so did the technical headaches. How do we handle all the traffic without compromising the service. Our budget was never huge, so we had to make modest technical arrangements while keeping the Network running as smoothly as possible. Aside from the MaltaMedia News Service, we also run aboutmalta.com, MaltaWeather.com and maltafootball.com -- three of the most popular Maltese websites. These sites, along with other services on the MaltaMedia Online Network, require huge amounts of server space and a substantial amount of bandwidth. Finding the right balance is often a juggling act. Sometimes it's fun, other times it's literally the stuff of nightmares.

Anyway, too cut a very long story short, the hosting company I embraced about 8 years ago has now been acquired by an even larger company and it honestly feels like there's no joy within the new structure. I understand that the crazy ideas from the first years of web development are now history, and that security is a major concern for anyone running an online network. Still, I refuse to give in to the pressure of whatever conventional wisdom sucks out the spirit of whatever makes working with the MaltaMedia Online Network worth it. It's never been about money for me...not even during the dot-com boom.

For some reason, apparently security, I've been advised to change the URL for my blog to eliminate the tilde (~) from the address for my blog -- http://www.maltamedia.com/~blog/ -- it will still look and work the same way it does now, just at a new web address. So, sometime over the next couple of days, my blog will move to www.tonisant.com/blog, which seems like a more logical address for it anyway. In most cases the switch will be virtually invisible, but somehow I have a feeling that some of the old pages will not redirect properly because I haven't always been consistent in the way I name my files, folders, etc.

How's that for a roundabout way of announcing that my blog is moving to a new web address?

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