“It’s moving day, it’s moving day, hey, baby, hey!”
This week, for the first time, the world at large will get to see The Schumin Web at its new home at its new host, The Entangled Web, based in Gainesville, Georgia, about 40 miles or so out of Atlanta. Many of you may wonder why I’ve moved my site, and on top of that, why I’m telling you all about this. As many people know, on July 16, 1998, I began what turned out to be a three-year journey with what was then SimpleNet. I moved up in the world from a subdirectory to a subdomain. It also marked the point when I actually started to PAY to host this site. Back then, The Schumin Web was very different from as it was now. I had freshly redesigned the site for the move, and also took the opportunity to change some of the structure of the site. As some may recall, this was when I first integrated my previously-independent Today’s Special site into The Schumin Web‘s hierarchy. Back in 1998 when I started with SimpleNet, they were an independent company in San Diego, California. Soon after I started hosting with them, they were bought by Broadcast.com. If my memory serves correctly, about a year later, Broadcast.com was bought by Yahoo. This put SimpleNet under Yahoo’s wings. I remember back then, if you stretched the truth slightly, that I was able to make the claim that The Schumin Web was part of the Yahoo network of sites. The Schumin Web kept on going as always, without interruption. SimpleNet eventually became Yahoo Website Services, and in September of 2000, made me change from my old SimpleNet plan to a new Yahoo Website Services plan. I didn’t like it at first, because it curtailed my expansion with a space quota, and forced some reorganization, but I did get a real domain as part of the deal, along with Email services. So overall, it was a move up in the world. It also coincided with my planned annual redesign, so I was able to officially launch the domain with a redesigned version of The Schumin Web. Now, fast-forward to October 2001. After learning in those lovely College of Business classes of mine how to use Microsoft Access, and also, through messing with FrontPage, discovering how to integrate Access databases into my Web site, I determined that I could use them for my quotes, for StratoSearch (a search engine I’m working on), as well as other things. So I experimented, and figured out how to make it work. Great deal, one would think. Time for an upgrade. So after experimentation on my computer, I then uploaded some test pages to the real thing – The Schumin Web itself. So I uploaded test pages alongside the regular pages, and I hit a roadblock. Yahoo Website Services, since it turned out that it ran on UNIX servers, didn’t support the .asp file extension that I needed in order to make my databases work. After firing off a quick message to Yahoo asking if they had plans to support active server pages in their basic accounts in the near future, and getting a message back that pretty much said that I should upgrade to a dedicated server package if that’s what I want for my site (that only cost ten times more than what I was paying them at the time), the determination was made to change to a new host who would support my plans. After a little hunting, I found The Entangled Web, who offered all that I needed (plus more space!) at a comparable price to what Yahoo was charging. So I signed up, uploaded the site, set up my databases, and here I am! Ta-daa! If all goes well, The Schumin Web will be with Entangled Web for a long time to come.
Date posted: December 3, 2001