I first set up Orient Lodge back in August, 2004. My recollection is that I was running Drupal 4.0. Since then, I’ve made various changes and upgrades over the years, and this past week has been time for a spring cleaning.

I rapidly outgrew the first hosting service that I used, and moved to Site5 in May 2005. I set it up as a ‘resellers’ account, because I wanted to host websites for other folks, particularly political and nonprofit websites. Over the years, I’ve had mixed results with Site5. They stayed up pretty well, but every once in a while, I would have difficulties and I found their support unreliable at best. In particular, a couple times they have said that my standard Drupal sites have been taking up too much resources and they’ve locked the account. As a reseller, this has caused nightmares for various clients.

Well, they did it again last Sunday, so my sites were down for a while. Fortunately, another client had had similar problems with Site5 and had moved to Slicehost. For a geek like me, the move was very simple. So, when Site5 locked my account, I quickly moved Orient Lodge over to Slicehost. I have spent the week moving many of my other sites over. It has been long and complicated, because I have over 100 old subdomains, and around 40 old domains that I needed to sort through and determine which subdomains and domains needed to be migrated, and which could be scrapped.

So, this week, I’ve been sorting through the sites, and reconfiguring the sites that stay. It is also complicated, because not only am I moving websites, but I’m moving email accounts and DNS entries.

While I am at it, I started sorting through the widgets on my site. I’ve moved a bunch of my old widgets off of my sidebars over to Old Widgets and Stuff. Then I’ve moved things around on the sidebar and updated my picture. Hopefully, this will get my site running a little more quickly.

I also used Yahoo!’s Yslow to determine other things that were slowing down my site. I found that a couple old widgets weren’t working properly and I updated them. With that, I hope that the site will end up being a little bit more quickly.

Meanwhile, when I’m not in front of my computer, I’m spending time of other forms of spring cleaning. Be back later.