now, i’ve worked a lot with server hardware.  i could build a premium web server to my own rigorous specs but salt lake city does not offer residential fiber optic high speed internet, and anything less than that is not a viable solution to me for hosting more than one or two database-driven, modest traffic sites.  i have no problem with putting flat html sites up on our server that aren’t going to be getting page 1 google rankings, but anything more and i don’t feel comfortable offering up ourselves as a viable solutions.

so. as i said, shopping for a dedicated server.  the current low bids are aplus, who offers a cheap dedicated server at $59/mo and 1&1 who offers a value linux server for $69.  we can’t really afford anything over $100/mo, linux is preferred, as is green energy.  i really want to make the goal of being totally green for our company, and i’m willing to pay a little extra to make that happen, but we’re not in a position to do a $400 managed hosting plan just to have solar energy.  i also, really, really dislike aplus, and between aplus and 1&1, i’m leaning toward 1&1, even granted that with a dedicated server, it’s unlikely aplus could really screw anything up for me.  we’ve just had some really bad experiences in the past with customers and aplus and it’s really not a place i want to go.

i’m reaching out to anyone who reads our blog to offer up suggestions of hosts that offer dedicated servers.  unless you can convince the salt lake county mayor to open up fiber optic, which would be cool, also.  but seeing as how the leader of that initiative lives a few blocks away from me, owns a local (and the first local) ISP, campaigned insisently with the previous mayor before running for US Senate himself was shot down primarily by Qwest and Comcast (and especially Qwest who would — the proposal went — be building the infrastructure with their existing field service techs), it’s unlikely that we’ll get fiber in the next month or so.  i’ve found a couple green hosts, but they’re way expensive, and we’re on a low budget at the moment, so i’m willing to put off the green hosting for a while until we can get established and then come back to it later.

I changed the portfolio to use a really awesome gallery by Airtight Interactive, so you should head over to their site and give them lots of business and money because they deserve it.

http://openedweb.com/blog/2008/09/05/great-elgg-10-plugins-trickling-in/

In other news, I added some more stuff to the portfolio.  Some cd covers, book covers, and real art, as well as business cards we’ve done.