I’m going dark in an hour or so. In preparation for the big move tomorrow, I’m about to shut down and pack up the home computers and tear down our internet connection. Shortly after posting this message, for the first time in over 15 years, my wife and I will no longer have broadband internet access.

Except for an iPad and both our iPhones with LTE, along with the Kindle Fire and Lenovo ThinkPad we have tethered to them, of course, which should last us until we can use the WiFi I setup in the new home. Because we’re not savages.

But other than that, totally dark.

See you on the other side…

For the last few years, this blog has been hosted on a smallish Virtual Private Server (VPS) at A Small Orange. I had originally started with a typical shared hosting account, but one of the sites I was hosting for a friend started getting a lot of traffic, and I needed something a little beefier to take the load. It just made sense to put my other sites on the VPS as well, including Windypundit.

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with hosting at A Small Orange. The technology makes sense to me, and support staff have been responsive and helpful. But it is a low-cost service, so there have been a few glitches. The server goes down occasionally, dropping off the internet for a few minutes, and every once in a while something worse goes wrong, and it stops serving web pages until I notice it’s down and restart it, which can mean several hours of down time. I’ve been living with that, however, because I like everything else about A Small Orange and the price is right.

Then late on Christmas day the site went down. It took me a couple of hours to notice the problem.  (I get notifications from monitoring services, but who pays attention to that stuff on Christmas Day?) I tried logging in to restart the server, but I couldn’t get to the VPS management tools for my server. So I filed a support ticket.

It took unusually long for ASO support to get back to me, and all they could do is refer me to a network status report which explained that “a network issue was identified with some VPS servers” and they were working on it.

It’s now been 90 hours since my VPS went down, and they’ve issued over two dozen updates, including a second network status report and there’s no end in sight. Clearly something has gone terribly wrong. As near as I can tell, network problems with their servers at the TierPoint facility in Dallas caused a bunch of VPSs to shutdown in a way that makes them difficult to restart correctly, and continuing network problems are making things worse. All these problems have overwhelmed the support staff, and they are many hours behind in handling trouble tickets.

The folks at A Small Orange have been good to me over the years, and I felt bad for them. I have some experience fighting technical problems like that, and it’s not easy. But I wanted to have my websites up.

It’s not easy shopping for VPS services in a hurry, and they vary wildly in price depending on the level of service provided, but I found a reasonably priced plan at InMotion Hosting. It took them a couple of hours to get me set up with a VPS, and then I had to load my websites onto the server. I’d prefer to have done live transfers from the old server, but with the server down I had to fallback to backup copies from Christmas morning. I figure not much happened on Christmas, so I probably didn’t lose anything significant. After that, I just had to point all the DNS records to the new server and let the changes propagate.

All my sites should be visible to users now. It’s been less than a day, so I can’t tell if InMotion is going to work out yet. I’ll give it a month and see what happens before deciding if I should stay with them, go back to A Small Orange (especially if they offer nice apology freebies), or try some other service (suggestions welcome). This is about the sixth time I’ve changed hosting services, and I seem to be getting good at it.

In an earlier post, I wrote,

The whole point of a blog like this is to share everything on the site with literally anyone who wants to see it. In fact, I’ve gone through rather a lot of trouble to make sure that happens.

That got me thinking about all the bits of technology that it takes to put a blog like this on the web. I decided to make a list, and it turns out there are a lot of pieces. To start with, there’s the main WordPress installation:

• WordPress — the blogging engine that powers it all.

The look and feel comes from the WordPress theme I use, which is made up of about four big pieces:

• Hybrid Core Framework — A PHP library for building WordPress themes.
• Hybrid Theme — An example theme for the Hybrid Core framework.
• Skeleton — A customizable child theme of the Hybrid theme.
• scssphp — A PHP implementation of SCSS/SASS.

I’ve customized Skeleton to produce the theme I use for Windypundit. I use the SCSS preprocessor to do some of the math to make the look and feel more tunable.

Naturally, Windypundit uses a number of WordPress plugins:

• Cookies for Comments — A simple anti-spam plugin that rejects some less intelligent spambots.
• Google XML Sitemaps — Adds a sitemap for Google.
• Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin — Another simple anti-spam plugin. This generates the “Confirm you are NOT a spammer” checkbox.
• NextGEN — An image gallery management tool. I don’t use all the gallery features.
• Search Regex — A potentially dangerous tool that allows me to search-and-replace regular expressions across all blog posts.
• W3 Total Cache — Caching software, so pages can be served quickly without as many hits to the database.
• WordPress HTTPS — Improves HTTPS support.
• WordPress SEO — Makes pages a little more search-engine friendly. I only use a fraction of the features.
• wp-jquery-lightbox — Displays photos bigger when you click on them. I use this instead of NextGEN’s viewer.
• WP Widget Cache — Caches the widgets on pages so they can be served without re-querying the database.

I also wrote two small custom plugins:

• Custom Dynamic Photo Resizer — A WordPress shortcode to generate resized photos for blog posts. If I want to change the size of all the photos in my layout, I just change the resizer implementation and all the images will be generated and served at the new size.
• Custom Shortcodes — A variety of custom WordPress shortcodes to replace features I had in custom tags on Movable Type. Hardly ever used anymore.

I also make use of a bunch of web-based services which are integrated via WordPress plugins:

• Akismet — A collective anti-spam service that detects and deletes common spam patterns.
• Google Analyticator — Adds Google Analytics on the site.
• Jetpack — WordPress’s all-in-one access point to various WordPress-served features.
• Social Login – A plugin that allows me to accept logins from Facebook and Twitter for people leaving comments. Makes use of the OneAll protocol translation service.
• Woopra — Integrates Woopra realtime analytics into the site.
• VaultPress — Backs up the blog VaultPress‘s servers.

All advertising content on the site comes from

• Amazon Affiliates program.

Windypundit is hosted on a smallish Virtual Private Server from the folks at A Small Orange. I use a VPS instead of shared hosting because I host a number of other websites and because I wanted to learn about running a website on a VPS.

The server is running a standard LAMP stack:

• Linux — The operating system. It’s the CentOS distro.
• Apache — The web server.
• MySQL — The relational database that holds the WordPress content.
• PHP — The scripting language that ties it all together. WordPress is written in PHP, along with all of its plugins.

A few other bits run on the server as well:

• nginx — Running as a reverse proxy for improved caching.
• cPanel/WHM — The web-based hosting management software.

As I said, it’s actually a virtual server, meaning that A Small Orange has carved out a couple of processor cores and some memory from a larger server. There’s also a SAN array for disk storage. All hosted sites are backed up nightly to Amazon S3 and then rolled over to Glacier.

The servers and disk arrays are located in (I think) TierPoint’s a 68,000 square foot data center in Dallas, Texas. The data center is SSAE 16 SOC 1 certified, with fully redundant HVAC and fully 2N redundant power, with six backup diesel generators fed from a 50,000 gallon fuel reserve. The facility is multi-homed and carrier neutral with connections to Level3, Abovenet, TimeWarner, Suddenlink, Cogent, Global Crossing, and IP Transit. I’m sure there are Fortune 500 companies hosted in the same data center.

Only the main HTML page of Windypundit comes from that server. All of the embedded static components — images, style sheets, Javascript — are served from cached copies in 31 data centers all over the world in the Cloudflare content distribution network so that pages load more quickly.

This is, beyond a doubt, an insane amount of technology for a humble little blog full of libertarian ranting and occasional cat pictures.

The thing is, none of this is particularly special. All of you who have WordPress blogs are using mostly the same technology. You might not have Cloudflare or some of the other layers of caching, and you’re using a different theme and a different selection of plugins, but the rest is basically the same. You might not be as interested in the technology as I am, but we’re all using WordPress, we’re all running on some variation of the LAMP stack, and we’re all hosted out of a ridiculously over-spec’d data center.

On a personal bloggy note, this past week I’ve started seeing signs that Windypundit is once again beginning to draw a bit of attention. The tweet for my post about the attempt to shut down the Bronx Defenders because of a rap video was retweeted by a relatively large number of people, starting with Gideon and Scott, and that post has received about 25 times the traffic one of my posts usually gets. I’ve also received a couple of private “Thank you” emails from Bronx Defenders staff, and David Feige was nice enough to drop by in the comments.

And now I see that Radley Balko at the Washington Post has published an article on the Bronx Defenders’ troubles, and it includes a link to my post and an extended quote from it. That’s pretty cool — getting that kind of attention from a WaPo columnist. Strangely, however, the part of my post that Radley decided to use was my attempt to explore what the lyrics of Uncle Murda’s “Hands Up” really mean. Because, when you’re looking for insights into rap music, aren’t I the first person you think of?

Just call me MC Big Windz. And join me next week when I disclose yet another version of Big Sean’s Blessings, speculate whether Meek Mill’s second studio album can possibly repeat the rambunctious mayhem of his debut, and discuss rumors of an emerging 100th problem for Jay-Z.

According to WordPress, 2014 was a slow year, with only 114 posts, almost a quarter of which were on a Saturday. And for the first time in years, the #1 post was not my anti-Sprint rant. Instead it was my post about the protests in Ferguson. In addition to the usual social media outlets, I owe Popehat and Gamso for much of my traffic.

My most active commenter was Allison Williams, or rather, the Indian outsourcing firm to which Allison Williams’ internet marketing agency gave her link building subcontract. The second and third most active commenters were Scott Greenfield and Jack Marshall, which probably annoys both of them. Matt Haiduk and nidefatt round out the top five. The rest of you didn’t make WordPress’s list, but I thank you all…or at least all of you who are real people. It would get lonely here without you.

Furthermore, here at Windpundit, 2014 was the year in which:

• I posted a goodbye to PDGirl’s cat Simon.
• I explained that libertarians aren’t anti-vax.
• I explained how cold -14°F is.
• I pointed out that there’s more than enough debt to blame Obama for some of it.
• I lamented that “Don’t talk to cops” isn’t very helpful advice.
• I explained why I hate to debate evolution.
• I challenged prosecutors to do something about the exclusionary rule.
• I explained some basic economic effects of Obamacare.
• I proposed a solution to handling multi-format legal briefs.
• I posted some photos of our Ragdoll cat Beezle growing up.
• I ridiculed Professor Thane Rosenbaum’s proposal for hate speech laws.
• I explained that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and then I explained why I thought that.
• I ranted about what law enforcement really means.
• I reviewed Toni Dwiggins’s Forensic Geology mystery series.
• I gave criminal lawyers a tummy rub.
• I rambled about a couple of things wrong with the criminal justice system.
• I explained why bioethicists bother me.
• I explained why fuel synthesis does not mean the end of big oil.
• I poked fun at the whiny little bitch who runs Peoria. Twice.
• I caught up with the SORNA challenge, which I blogged about before.
• I argued that allowing the election commissions to punish politicians for lying is a recipe for disaster.
• I proposed a revolutionary new way to execute criminals.
• I suggested that Kent Scheidegger needs to pay more attention to Gary Becker., and followed up with more discussion of crime and incentives.
• I argued against controversial graduation speakers.
• I argued that spree killers do not represent their community.
• I rambled on about the problem of presuming good faith.
• I wrote about the SWAT raid that burned a baby.
• I discussed the amount of trust to place in the confession of a killer.
• I complained about a silly meme about Obama’s handling of the economy.
• I reviewed Jesse Walker’s United States of Paranoia.
• I speculated whether buffer zones and free speech zones were affected by the same ruling.
• I said both Ken Lammers and the Pope were wrong about drugs.
• I explained how Obamacare politicized healthcare.
• I discovered that the gormless plonkers who run the internet in the U.K. are blocking my blog.
• I explained why Net Neutrality pisses me off.
• I explained why I’d like to buy a Geiger counter.
• I gave up on Sitemeter.
• I speculated about the real purpose of the Better Government Party.
• I met Maggie McNeill at Liberty On the Rocks.
• I lampooned how cops handle complaints.
• I explained why Obamacare insurance refunds aren’t as good as they sound.
• I joined the Bill Bratton pile-on for his idiotic definition of democracy.
• I ripped into the Bad Boss Tax.
• I poked fun at the idea of automated sentencing.
• I posted about the situation in Ferguson, the protests, and the weeks to follow.
• I discovered my blog comments had stopped working.
• I explained that helping women avoid sexual attacks is not victim-blaming.
• I imagined my readers nude.
• I criticized biglaw lawyers who don’t understand negotiation.
• I argued that technical violations of firearms laws are not the same as real crimes.
• I linked to a really cool Batman-themed mash-up music video.
• I explained why Apple was right to limit decryption of their phones, no matter what Orin Kerr thinks.
• I pointed out that the politics of global warming make people suspicious of it.
• I thought it was okay for the Secret Service to not kill people on the White House lawn.
• I complained that my favorite Terminator will not be back.
• I pointed out that Andrew Burstein has monstrously bad ideas about the Constitution.
• I explained why Greg Laden’s car-buying confusion is an argument for carbon taxes.
• I argued that eliminating plea bargaining is complicated.
• I went back to the Borderlands.
• I explained to a guy who calls himself an economist that low production costs are a good thing.
• I argued that the GamerGate threats are probably nothing to worry about.
• I started writing a series of posts about lethal force.
• I discussed the lack of competition in Internet Service Providers.
• I explained why the post-grand-jury protests in Ferguson upset me.
• I pointed out that Mother Jones‘s math on racism is really bad.
• I argued that too much “believing victims” has some bad side effects.
• I showed what’s in that photography bag I’ve been carrying around.
• I thought about the torture report.
• I argued about protesters and cop killers and responded to some criticism.
• I learned that Quicken makes some alarming changes to my financial records.

That was most of it. See you all in 2015!