blogjunkie.net is sporting a new theme! What do you think?
The new theme is Minblr by Themify. Despite the somewhat awkward name, I’m very pleased with the theme.
Although there’s no shortage of great-looking WordPress themes, it’s tough finding ones that are high quality and have excellent support as well. I’m glad to say that Themify got things right with Minblr.
First, a quick overview of its headline features. Read More »
Last month I made the switch to Site5, away from Media Temple. The reason for doing so was because of terrible response times on Media Temple. This post is a quick follow up to share my experience of the first month on Site5.
First of all, response times have improved tremendously. The difference is like night and day. My average response time is now 750ms, down from 2,946ms in January.
blogjunkie.net (and soon the rest of my sites) is now hosted on Site5. This was a tough decision to make, since it would involve migrating all of my sites but I felt that it was necessary because of the project that I’m launching in a few weeks. I didn’t want my members to have a poor site experience due to my web host, Media Temple.
Media Temple, I really wanted it to work out
I’ve been a customer of Media Temple for 2.5+ years. I was attracted to the benefits of their Grid Service because I had outgrown simple shared hosting but wasn’t smart enough to manage my own VPS. The Grid Service promised better scalability and reliability for USD20/month which I was happy to pay. However the Grid constantly had hiccups. In the beginning I decided to stick with Media Temple because of the hassle to switch web hosts and because of their great customer service.
Unfortunately things have deteriorated to the point where I can’t see the situation improving so I’m cutting my losses. In particular, the response times for the Grid Service is absolutely horrible. And lately their customer service ain’t that great either. I did my homework when planning where to move to and used Pingdom to monitor Media Temple’s uptime and response time. The Grid’s response time was consistently more than 2,000 ms, and regularly over 3,000 ms. Here’s the response time report for Jan 2011:
Media Temple Response Time Jan 2011
If you’re curious, you can see the previous 3 month history at this link.
Finally, I’m happy with the way the blog looks and works. I don’t know what caught a hold of me, but I dropped everything else to re-do this blog and its design.
Probably the thing that got me really excited was the Simpla theme by Phu Ly. Really simple and elegant, clean code, and I really loved the colours too. It gave me a great platform to work from and enhance.
I’m still thinking about changing the header to give it a bit more personality. A project for another day… In the meantime, I hope I will start to blog more here. Now, to bed.