After almost four years my free hosting service finally didn’t work out any longer and I was annoyed about the outages and the other clients on the shared box annoyed about the traffic I caused.

So I bit the bullet and got myself a new server for all my sites. I looked around a bit, dropped some mails on thelist and with other bloggers and I decided to go for the grid server offer of media temple in the USA.

I dreaded the move, as over the years I have acccumulated a lot of data connected to 6 different domains. All the more I was very much surprised to see that I was able to get and connect a new domain, shift my data over and reconnect my old domains (onlinetools.org is still on the old server) to the gridserver within less than two hours!

The admin interface of the grid server allows you to define which domains to use, set up the mail servers and webmail interfaces and lets you define whether to use PHP4 or 5 on a per-domain basis.

You can add extra PHP components by altering an add-on to the php.ini and you have MySQLAdmin by default. Urchin is also included, but I haven’t set that up yet, and you have preconfigured WordPress, ZenCart and Drupal in case you want it. I tweaked this WordPress too much to go all fresh and new, but maybe I will at a later stage.

I now also have a proper spam filter and can play with Ruby, which is pre-installed, too. All in all, I am very happy so far and the price of $20 per month seems not to be too high for what your are getting.

I played with JSON, event delegation and the APIs of flickr for the upcoming hack day and thought it’d be fun to explore flickr only by tags.

Using the YUI, I put a small example together that allows you to search for a tag, get all the other tags entered by flickr users and see the photos related to the current tag. You can then click the next tag, get the related tags for this one and so on and so forth.

Have a play and check out flickrdrillr now