I’ve been delaying doing an upgrade to the latest-greatest until I had a few free hours. I made all the necessary backups, made a database backup and clicked on the upgrade button (This is a major revision upgrade). less than 2 minutes later, the whole upgrade is complete, the database has been upgraded and it looks like all the plugins are happy as well. Another ringing endorsement for Wordpress.

It looks like my remaining hard drive on the old web server is finally giving up the ghost. I will be migrating everything over to the new server this weekend, so there may be additional outages when I decide to make the cut-over, but this should be a flash cut via a firewall rule change. I was a bit surprised when I checked the site earlier and nothing happened, attempts to log onto the server were also met with no response.

The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up. I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.

It seems to have propagated rather quickly. I suspect some web-caching devices may take longer, but the three different external sites I have tried all show it as up and visible. That’s rather encouraging really. For those looking for a web host, I have managed to find a couple of Canadian ones that have reasonable rates. I’ll post some info later, as I’d like to pull a couple of sites I have in the US back to Canada.

I’m, changing ISPs and as a result, the site may end up down while I get everything fixed up. Hopefully the changes will occur overnight and it will be quick and dirty, but I am not sure how long it will take for the changes to propagate. The short answer is that I’m expecting it all to be transparent, but you never know.