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A year or so ago we migrated quite a few of our firm’s server functions, including this blog, and our firm’s main web site and our firm’s shopping cart, to a shared server in this large building (company web site) in Phoenix, Arizona (aerial photo at right).  I’ve never been in that building and my best guess is I won’t ever be in that building. The shared server was on an equipment rack in a cage controlled by our hosting service provider.  The building provides multiple connections to the Internet and diesel-powered backup power supplies.  In the photograph you can see the diesel fuel storage tanks.

Shared servers are really good to know about.  A shared server can provide a very inexpensive way to host many functions in a secure and reliable environment. 

On a shared server, you are sharing processor and hard-drive and network-connection bandwidth resources with others on the same server.  This means that if you were to use too much of the resources, your hosting service provider would suggest you move to a dedicated server.  This also means that if some other user or users on the same server were to use a lot of resources at a particular time, your functions would get slowed down.  If for example you were hosting a web site on the server, the web site might run slower for visitors to the web site, because of the activities of other users on the shared server.  Another thing to keep in mind is that not all hosting service providers are created equal.  Some providers will load too many users on a shared server, and the result will be that it runs slowly for everyone.

Back when we used a shared server at Godaddy, it often ran slowly.  I imagine this is because Godaddy put lots of users onto each server.  It is part of why we migrated to our present hosting service provider.  During the time that we used a shared server with our present hosting service provider, it happened only very rarely that the shared server would run slowly for us. 

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A couple of months ago we migrated most of the functions that were on that shared server to a dedicated server.  The dedicated server costs more per month, but of course there are benefits to its being a dedicated server.  The server is very fast.  It never slows down because of other users, because there are no other users.  And you have “root access” meaning that you can do really neat things.  One of the neat things that I was able to do is to set up Let’s Encrypt (blog article) in the AutoSSL of the cPanel (Wikipedia article) in this machine.  The consequence of this is that we won’t ever again have to pay money for an SSL certificate for any web site on this server.

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I haven’t ever actually seen our dedicated server, and I probably never will, but from its specs I can guess that it might look like the one pictured at right. It takes up one “rack unit” on an equipment rack in the same cage where the shared server was located.

The natural question that one might ask is, if we ever were to find the need to reboot our dedicated server, how would we do it?  Would I need to get on an airplane, fly to Phoenix, present myself at this building, get myself admitted to the cage, figure out which server is mine, and push the “reset” button?   Or would I need to contact our hosting service provider and beg and plead for them to send someone to the cage to do this?

Surely not. 

So should the need arise, how would we reboot it?  Continue reading →

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When a notebook computer stops working, the usual next steps are:

• buy a new notebook computer, and
• spend at least two lost weekends getting the new computer loaded up and configured so that it does for you what the old computer used to do.

For must of us, the emotional cost of the second step, and the lost-professional-billing cost of the second step, far exceed the amount of money involved in the first step.

Yesterday I had to retire an old notebook computer and move to a new one.  But for me, the second step was only about ten minutes.  Not the usual two lost weekends.  How did this delightful result happen?  Continue reading →

(Update:  See a followup message here about a step that you might take to try to get the listservs working for you again.)

For those who are following my travails trying to get ISPs to accept our listserv email messages now that we are on our dedicated server (original post and update) … this posting about “munging” may be of interest.  Others are invited to skip this posting as being even more geeky than usual.  Continue reading →

Hello dear readers.  By now you may have noticed the layout of the blog is back to normal.  It will be recalled that a couple of days ago I had migrated this blog from a shared server to a dedicated server.  As it turns out, one of the consequences of the migration was that the server defaults to a newer version of PHP.  To get my regular WordPress theme functioning again, what I had to do is force it that this blog is running on a slightly older version of PHP.  And indeed the theme functions again.

So now things are back to normal.

Why does the Ant-Like Persistence blog look strikingly different today?  I did not want it to look different today but it does.  I will explain why it looks different. Continue reading →

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(I have posted a followup article.)

Hello readers who are in the US.  We all are familiar with this checkbox “this is a computer that I trust and use regularly”.  USPTO tells us that supposedly if we check this box, then for the next 24 hours we will be saved from the time-waste of having to do the two-step authentication.  This check box is super important given that a year or so ago the USPTO went against user wishes and shortened the forced-logout time interval from 60 minutes to a mere 30 minutes.  Anyway as readers know, this check box almost never actually works.  Finally today I figured out why it almost never works. Continue reading →

It was Penn Jillette whose comments on a television show (NSFW) made me realize that I had been misusing the term acronym all my life.   Continue reading →

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One way to purchase postage stamps from the US Postal Service is in coils of 100.  Just today in our office we purchased and placed into service this plastic dispenser for such a coil.  It is simple and elegant in its simplicity.   This dispenser replaces our expensive postage meter which we got rid of some time ago (blog article). 

This dispenser offers a sense of nostalgia, because it looks just like a dispenser that was in my home when I was a child.  For me, it’s in the category of comfort food.

In this blog article I said “Zelle cannot be used by a business”.  Recently, however, some banks that belong to Zelle, which is a money transfer service, have begun allowing businesses to use Zelle.  This article discusses this change. Continue reading →

Our firm receives many incoming international bank wires every month.  These wires come from patent and trademark firms outside the US and they come from corporate clients outside the US.  In most cases, the amount of money that we receive matches the amount of money the sender says they sent.  But often enough to be annoying, we will receive a wire that is “short”.  Sometimes the shortage is $15, sometimes $40, sometimes another amount.  Is there a way to eliminate the shortages?  This blog article describes something you can do to try to reduce or eliminate the shortages. Continue reading →