Buying a Server

I have been having problems with my website hosting company. I host 11 websites with hostonce.com and twice now all of these sites have been down for a couple days at a time, and the site for the company was down at the same time as well, so there was no way to submit a support ticket. After this happened the second time I decided I had to find a new hosting company. I wanted to be able to host all of my websites on one account with room to grow. I have 3 different accounts with hostonce since they offer a deal where you can upgrade to a 5 site host for 45 dollars above the 80 something price of one site. This was a good enough deal at first since I had locked in a yearly rate of 60 odd dollars plus the 45 for my first set of 5 sites, but over time it has proven to be a bit of a pain.

I looked into getting a dedicated server hosted for me, or ever a Virtual Private Server. The dedicated server setup would have cost over $4000 dollars a year, more than I can afford, and the VPS solution I found would have limited me to 30 websites and cost over $800 dollars a year.

Looking at those prices I began to wonder what it would cost to host my own webserver.
AT&T recently raised the price I was paying for internet from around $35 dollars a month to around $55 becuase we lost a discount we were getting.
Cox business internet service offers a plan with a dedicated IP and an OPEN port 80 for website hosting for $69 dollars a month. Not that much more than AT&T.
Dell offers a varity of servers for different price ranges. I found and ordered a very basic one on sale with a dual core 2.0ghz processor, two 80 gig hard drives, and 2gig of ram for $423.08 with taxes and Shipping. It should arrive next week.

Now I need to save up for the software to put on my server. Windows Web Server 2008 $469 Web Server-only product, no CALs required. Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Fortunatly there is a 60 day downloadable trial version of this software (which I am downloading right now) so I can install and setup my software now and pay for it next month.

Fun, Fun, Fun, I have a new toy on the way.

Importing Data From Shelby Systems

Today I did most of the Spark, caught up on email, and did the following work on the new CHMS:

Worked on Creating the Ability to Import People and Families from Shelby, this included creating Data Access and BLL layers for the needed Shelby tables, and new methods in several of the BLL Classes along with some Data Access methods to go with them.

Fortunately, Shelby stored its data in a SQL Server database as well, so I was able to shutdown SQL server on our Server computer, make copies of the database files, re-start SQL server, bring the copied files to my computer, and attach them to my local SQL Server Express edition. Thus I can work with the Shelby database without having to connect to the actuall database on the server, and thus risk data, or kick other people out.

I may eventually work on a way to move updated data back and forth, but for now, getting data out of Shelby and into the new system is enough of a challenge.