Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

I can not begin to explain how beneficial this card is. What is it? It's a membership card that gives you some really sweet discounts on various business (and lifestyle) related expenses. Blows American Express' benefits out of the water. While you can't use it to purchase anything, it's an awesome card to have.

Is there a cost? Yes, there is. They are running a promotion right now ($249 per year locked in) instead of the $499. Is it worth it? Yes. I believe at the $249/year it's worth it. I would personally start to wonder at $500/year. It is conceivably still very worthwhile at $500, but it depends on how much travel you do.

Your biggest savings? Travel. Depending on the airline, you can save a good bit and get access to priority boarding, etc. Things you would eventually get over time if you carried a bunch of frequent flyer cards. However, it's the hotel savings that really help. There's some pretty massive discounts.

The FoundersCard site claims on some hotels as much as 60% off...But I went to the hotel's site and discovered that wasn't true. Perhaps the "normal" price was taken at the height of some season...But, there is still a real good discount of anywhere between about 10% and 25% (sometimes more). So when you go somewhere and stay for say 3 or 4 days...It's basically like getting a free night. If it costs a couple hundred to stay...Well then...You just covered your annual membership cost in one trip.

So yes -- the FoundersCard is very worthwhile. Additionally, there's discounts on things like AT&T wireless plans, Rackspace hosting, and a bunch of other stuff. Discounts on things like flowers and spas, etc. There's plenty of lifestyle benefits. Rental cars too.

Then they have networking events. Given that this is highly targeted at startup companies, most are tech related. So if you're in the internet industry, these are great networking events to attend.

How do you get it? Well, it's by invitation only. So you need to know someone who has one. Guess what? I have one! So you can get in touch with me if you'd like an invite. I'd seriously consider it and I would get on it really soon while they have the promotional pricing.

The thing that stinks is you can't see all the benefits until you've been invited. Once invited, you can review all the benefits and then decide to sign up or not.

Well, Slicehost is coming to an end. I think many people are sad about that, if there aren't...There should be. It was an amazing hosting company. So amazing that mega hosting company Rackspace purchased them a while back. If you don't migrate yourself, they will migrate for you...To Rackspace! That's the good news.

I've been avoiding the inevitable migration from Slicehost to Rackspace... But over the past few days here I have done it. I love Rackspace just as much as Slicehost and would always recommend them to everyone out there.

What does that mean? Well, depending on how much bandwidth you run through, you will likely be paying a little less per month for hosting. The control panel does not have as many features as Slicehost's did...Though the design is a little neater if you're a fan...I'm a minimalist (w/o things being fugly), so I like Slicehost's manager design better...But Rackspace does have a cool API.

I've used many hosts over the years, for myself and for clients...You name it, I've likely tried it...Slicehost, Rackspace, VPS.net, MediaTemple, Lunarpages, AptHost, HostGator, GoDaddy (yuck - please stick to domain names only), and many many more... Even back in the day, geocities! Yea! haha. So at the end of a lot of banging my head on the desk, if you are out there looking for a good host, I would absolutely reccommend Rackspace. Best hosting company I have ever seen hands down. I really do bet I've seen (and worked with) more than your average bear too.

That said. Hosting. What is the hosting landscape in 2011? Are you on a shared host? Get off. Now. If you're a web designer/developer then you should be on a VPS by now. Cost was a pretty hard thing to get around, but Rackspace has a 256MB slice (Slicehost terminology, I mean cloud server size or whatever they call it) and it's going to run you around $12/mo. With bandwidth maybe a little more like $15 tops. I was around long enough to see shared hosting dip to like $7/mo. I have no clue what it's like now...It should be free. Regardless. Switch to a VPS. Sure, you'll need to setup the server from scratch, but there's enough tutorials out there and the only way for you to progress as a web developer is to tinker with a VPS.

When you let technology and your web server limit what you can do...You limit what you can learn and do as a web developer.

Rackspace has some really great servers with their cloud server offering. They also have cloud sites which as far as I'm concerned basically replaces shared hosting as we know it.

What else in 2011? Well, even in 2010, likely 2009 we have this really cool new thing PaaS. "Platform as a Service" ... Things like OpenShift from RedHat, CloudFoundry from VMWare (hey, they are down the road from me!), Orchestra.io, and a whole ton of Ruby services. These services let you deploy web apps (the cool word for sites when they do more than just show a web page) in the "cloud" (the cool word for having essentially mirrored copies of your site on multiple servers so perhcance one go down, your site is still visible by the world and scalability or in other words, "many hands make light work"). 

These services are great because you just run a command (I imagine it's not long before some IDE has it bulit in, if not already) and voila! Your site is out on the internet. 

The future is cool. Well, the present...Sorta. A lot of these services still can't quite get a grasp on the beast that is PHP. Orchestria.io by far is the best for PHP. The other PaaS' have varied support for PHP when it comes to MongoDB. They'll get there though.

So, just as I have migrated...This little blog post is a reminder that you too should probably take a look at your hosting situation and think about a little spring ... er late summer or fall cleaning. I can't tell, I'm all out of whack, where I live spring felt like winter and now late summer/fall feels like mid-summer.

I really need to update my website. First, my portfolio section is way dated. I want to add reference to at least one more major website that I got the opportunity to work on while at ExpandTheRoom, but I also have a few other person projects I'd like to list under that section as well. I'm still trying to figure out how to best list all of my open-source contributions too. I may change up the "portfolio" and "projects" section... 

Aside from all that, I want to be more active in posting blog entries (which I always say) and I want to bring in my Twitter feed since I usually post some great links there. Also, I've been struck by the creativity bug and I just want to put more effort into design. I really have a minimalistic design here that I'm not happy with. The new expriments with web typography that I've been playing with can really help me out.

I've been using Croogo, which is a really, really good blog/CMS for CakePHP. However, lately I've been working with the Lithium framework. In fact, so much that I'm really getting out of touch with CakePHP. So it really makes sense to move my site onto Lithium...Likely, the Minerva CMS I've been working on.

I may also setup a Q&A type section as well...Specifically with regard to the Lithium framework (but open to all areas of the web that I may be privy to). I don't want to have some sort of open Q&A site, but I do want to provide more insightful blog posts in the form of a "Q&A" for the little niche of the internet I find myself in. Kinda like some of the tips/tutorials that you can find throughout my blog, but now with a little more organization/emphasis.

I've left my full-time job and have gone off on my "own" (working with some good people), so I'm a free man! I'm on the loose and I'm dangerous. So stay tuned for some updates!