Hi everyone! I’ve moved this website (davidseah.com) from Media Temple to Opalstack. If you are experiencing any issues with accessing content like downloads for the productivity tools let me know on Mastodon or Twitter.

Here’s a bit more background about the move, with bonus web hosting drama :-)

The Media Temple brand is being retired by GoDaddy and my account is being converted into a GoDaddy account. I dislike the GoDaddy brand for their predatory practices in the early days, but when Media Temple was purchased by GoDaddy almost ten years ago I gave it some time to see how bad it would get, as moving my legacy WordPress blog is really complicated. I found that the Media Temple operations continued to work well and I was automigrated regularly to better servers without issue. Great! But now, GoDaddy is retiring the Media Temple brand and converting our accounts to GoDaddy accounts, and I don’t want to be part of that. I’ve heard anecdotally that GoDaddy is quite a different company now, but there are plenty of other growing companies that have maintained their integrity and would benefit more directly from my support instead of serving entitled shareholders who add nothing positive to the world.

Why move to Opalstack instead of another host? Opalstack is the spiritual successor to the late-lamented WebFaction (also stealthily acquired by GoDaddy). Opalstack is a bit quirky if you’re used to directly administrating a VPS running Apache. It presents an abstraction of a web presence as a collection of “applications” that are connected to “routes” that are anchored to “domains” to create a master object called a “site”. The user interface doesn’t show this relationship as clearly as I’d like (the “domains” and “sites” page in particular gives me a headache), but the documentation is unusually good. The support through forums and email is also extremely good; I think the people who are actually designing and maintaining the service are answering questions, and they do so in a timely manner. And then when I jumped ship from Twitter to Mastodon, I saw that Opalstack was already preparing their Mastodon server for customers so that’s where I went. Opalstack staff are living/sharing the Fediverse vibe as they learn about it (as I am), and I like what I’m seeing. This is what has given me the confidence to move my prime property to their server.

In case you missed it earlier, I’m maintaining davidseah.com as my “legacy identity”; much of my active writing is happening in three places:

• My Coworking Discord Virtual Cafe, where a bunch of readers and surprised wanderers are coming together to share experiences and encourage each other in their projects
• On Mastodon, where I am posting more “here’s what I’m thinking about process” stuff.
• On dsriseah.com, which is my “personal knowledge management system” that is an “open notebook” of various congealing ideas. Currently there is no way to interact with me on that site, as I’m still building out the website’s capabilities.

I recommend joining the first option if you’d like to share what you’re up to with me and other self-empowered, conscientious, positive-minded and kind people. The more the merrier!