After a couple of months of temporary hosting with A2 Hosting, I finally have my real server back online, at a colo space in San José. Not that I have any complaints against A2 (heck, I even just gave them a little more Google-juice); they were perfectly servicable. But I’ve really gotten used to having my own box that I have root on and can do whatever I want with; by comparison, cPanel just isn’t enough.
Possibly most important — certainly more important than I would have expected just a few years ago — is the fact that now I have my SVN repository back. I’ve recently checked in two months’ worth of code changes. I wound up describing the extreme discontinuity as “the Spring 2009 Downtime”, because the first few ideas that drifted through my head just sounded a little too grandiose and overblown.
Still, I’m reminded of a scene in Joe Haldeman’s early novel Mindbridge. A team of interstellar explorers get sent off to an unknown planet via teleportation technology, wearing fully self-contained environment suits that keep them alive for two weeks. When they’re teleported back to Earth and a safe enviroment, Haldeman writes: “they scrambled out [of their suits] to an orgy of backscratching”.
I know the feeling.