One of the very painful parts about running a website is selecting a host for your site. For those of you who are not techie, that means selecting the company who provides the computer connected to the internet where your website actually lives. While I am based in Montreal, my webservers have been located in Atlanta, Ga. for the last 6 years. That is about to change, and that is a great and scary thing.

The scary part is that the underside of a website for the most part is a ton of fairly complex plumbing and combative code. If you ever saw the movie Brazil, you have seen what the internet looks like. Under the shiny and pretty exterior is the code of hundreds of different people running over equipment made by different people over wires owned by all sorts of people to computers that are all different in their own way.

Every server is different. Even if you build two identical boxes right side by side, and load the same exact software on them, the moment you flip the switch and start building a website, they are different and they will never again be the same.

So over the next couple of weeks, I will be (theoretically) pulling the tent poles out from under hundreds of websites and putting them back up in another place, hopefully entirely invisibly and hopefully without disturbing your enjoyment.   It is the electronic equivialant of the spinning plates routine at the circus, where you try to keep all the plates spinning and not having any of them fall.  The move isn’t far in theory (the sites are going to be served from what is known as the “NAP of the Americas”, a well connected and super strong facility in Florida.  This will improve the speed at which the sites can be seen in Europe, South America, and Asia as this is a major switching hub for all of those areas as they enter in the US.  Effectively, I have moved everything a couple of steps closer to you.

It will take a few days, that is for sure, and everything is slowly getting set up and things are looking good.  Hopefully things will move without a blink… here is to hoping!