Pablo Fernandez

This page, my blog, pupeno.com, is now hosted on WordPress.com instead of my own server; and that’s is a little personal success. Let me explain.

I tend to be a control freak. I have my own servers. I run my own nameservers. I used to run my own mailserver but some time ago I switched to Google Apps for Domain. I used to run my blog in my own server, keeping my own set of plug ins, even modifying themes when necessary.

Last weekend I published Why I love Smalltalk and it got picked by Hacker News. That traffic killed my server. I spent the whole weekend restarting and tuning Apache. You see, I can run my own server, use Puppet, keep it clean and up to date but I’m not a sysadmin. I can pretend I am for short periods of time but I’m really just a coder. I was forced to have a crush course into server tuning and I eventually got it more or less stable. By the second wave of traffic it was not trashing anymore. I have better things to do with my time that tune a web server so I decided to move and I did it.

It is a personal success because I’m giving you up control. I can’t install whatever plug in I want now. I can’t modify themes. I’m not using my own nameservers anymore. I’m giving up control and simplifying my life when I have a natural tendency to make it more complex than it is.

At the moment, my beloved pupeno.com is not ny any of my servers. Nothing. Every service related to pupeno.com is running on third party hosted solutions. I’m letting go, sleeping better and being happier.

Only a couple of hours after I migrated my blog and went it sleep it was picked by Reddit. More than double the traffic of Hacker News (that is, Hacker News minus my server downtime) and I didn’t woke to a burning and smoking server, just an impressive traffic chart and even more comments. I’m happy.