The Village has a new temporary home and while we have a much improved service, it is causing me some headache -- the tradeoffs of doing business I suppose.
The fact of the matter is that a small business has to be smart about where and when it spends its money. My personal expertise includes high-end computer architecture and performance and I knew that I'd be looking for some dedicated hardware to run GATE
Village within the first year of going live. I've always been convinnced that the idea will fly and that people will flock to becoming members. I did not want to start there however.
The problem with dedicated hardware is that there is a lot of work in keeping it running and safe from dissaster. You need a serious business continuity plan that includes hard-drives breaking and other (less likely but still disasterous) hardware failures. You need alerts and monitoring, paging and ...uggg! So I really didn't want to start there because I wanted to focus on the application not the infrastructure.
Unfortunately GATE Village is simply too functional for a small-busisness hosting plan -- I'm not using bandwidth or disk, I'm using RAM and CPU -- ouch! So, I was not surprised that my provider was unable to meet my needs for the price I was paying, however I am somewhat suprprised to find out that my provider doesn't have any service that would allow me to run GATE Village properly (though I probably shouldn't be surprised really).
So, my burden is your gain .. the village runs very well now and I'll just get a tad less sleep than before :-)