This web site, along with several others, previously was served off of a Linux box sitting underneath my desk here at the Pike House. The internet connection was a DSL line. Unfortunately, problems with our ISP, Joink, severed my server’s link to the outside world. Consequently, I decided find a permanent home for my server, somewhere that would not be susceptible to network outages and power failures. In other words, a data center.

After much searching, I happened upon a company that would sell me a dedicated server hosted at a data center in Florida at a very reasonable price. Not long after, Keacher.com found its new home on a shiny new server with a fat pipe to the Internet. The bandwidth is considerable: for example, when the “Sapphire” worm hit the Internet this morning, my server was receiving a sustained 9.6 Mbit/s of traffic for almost five hours. Incidentally, that attack, which brought traffic across most of the Internet to a crawl, made a fun picture on the router stats page (traffic is from the router’s perspective, so ‘out’ traffic is actually going into my server). Coincidentally, my server is named Sapphire, to go along with my other Linux box Ruby, my Win2k desktop Emerald, and my WinXP laptop Diamond.