TPN 3.0
Today we launched TPN 3.0. Brand new servers sitting in a different datacentre. We’ve moved from HostRocket, where we’ve been hosted since about March 2005, to Dedicated Central. We spent a long time making the decision of where we should be hosted and chatted with a bunch of hosting providers, from Australia to the USA. Disappointingly from my perspective, none of the hosting operations in Australia could do us a deal comparative with those we could get in the USA. As a proud Aussie, and a former ISP guy, I would have loved to cut a deal with an Australian web hosting partner, but it wasn’t to be. They wanted to charge us somewhere between 4X and 10X what we are being charged by a premium dedicated service in the USA. Lots of the locals sounded keen until we got down to the ducks guts. Once they found out how much bandwidth we are doing, and how much of it is going to the USA, they inevitably either balked or wanted to charge us a whack for bandwidth.
I’ve really got to take my hat off to the team at Pixel Ink Media. Mano Stephan and his loyal band of cut-throat, ne’er-do-wells planned and executed the rather hairy migration down to a T. And that’s after they spent the last few months keeping us running on the old shit, telling me on a daily basis that we needed new shit and FAST. We’re running 40+ blogs and podcasts, a couple of terabytes of traffic each month, an audience of hundreds of thousands spread across 120 countries, running on WordPress, MySQL and Linux… there isn’t an O’Reilly textbook for doing this kind of stuff. Mano and the P.I.M. team scoped out the hosting options, designed the migration, and worked their chubby little fingers to the bone over the last couple of months to get it done. Xmas, New Years, weekends, birthdays… they don’t sleep. And it ain’t for the money. They are believers in TPN and I’m grateful for everything they’ve done in the last few months to keep us going. One day we’ll write a book about the shit we’ve been through in the last six months. Anyway… Mano is the best. If any of you are looking for a webdev/architecture partner, I’d highly recommend him. He’s one of those guys you know you can rely on completely. He doesn’t sleep. He does what he says he’s going to do. I haven’t met many guys like him in my time. His boy Mick Hanna over in Perth is also a kickass GUN. We love him. Mick rode into TPN town form the West on a tall mighty steed, told us we had some bad juju and that his crazy-ass witch doctor potions could bring us mighty white man healing. And it came to pass.
So… where to from here?
We’re going to put a new coat of paint on the ol’ girl. At the same time, we’re going to pimp her up. Mano is going to be our Xzibit.
And I want to ramp up from 40-odd shows to 500 by the end of the year. That means I’m going to try to add an average of ten new shows a week. If you want to do a podcast for TPN, now is the time to talk to me. Send me an email with “TPN Host” in the subject and I’ll walk you through the application process.
You think 2006 was the year of the podcast? Hold on to your panties.
January 4th, 2006 at 10:14 am
It really is sad isn’t it that we cant keep our money in Australia, I’ve experienced the same thing myself and the US hosts are always 5-10 times cheaper, and then you get the local guys telling you how much risk you take going off shore because they don’t want to compete on dollars…maybe one day. Undoubtedly though TPN has now contributed further to our trade deficit :-)
January 4th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Nah not really mate. We’ve got US money streaming into our bank account, so it all evens out.
But yeah, the hosting situation in this country is atrocious. I asked a couple of ISP’s “so why in the name of CRUM are people using you guys at all??? Why don’t they just go off-shore??” And they said “well they don’t have the high-end requirements you guys do”.
I even urged a few of them to buy a frakkin server and put it in the US for me, so I could keep my relationship locally but still avoid the “Telstra tax”. They didn’t seem to be interested.
February 4th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Duncan wrote about the lie concerning revenue and what he see’s as: Keeping money in Australia.
I believe that the majority of Australian would like a government that extrated the least ammount of taxes and allow as minority demographic that mistakes resources with ability and talent. That voice I feel is the death of Australian innovation and any Australian economic growth. I feel the underlying strategy of any small team or business unit is that units relationship and their steps to reach that goal.