When Marson and RPG Works announced plans to cease operations in early 2012, I wasted no time in hunting for an alternative hosting site for OtherSpace and jointhesaga.com.

I signed on with Register.com for both the website and the game. However, the game proved too problematic for Register.com to handle. That meant shifting the game elsewhere. I chose Linode.com. This doubled the hosting costs. It also gave me a chance to compare reliability and customer service response for both.

During the past two years, the game has only gone down once or twice, with ample warning. The website, on the other hand, was taken offline repeatedly, without warning, by Register.com. The default message posted in place of the website implied each time that it was some kind of billing issue when, in fact, it was always a technical problem sparked by some kind of security breach in the hosting software.

2013 has been an extremely lean year for contributions to the game. Rather than saddling myself with $400+ in Jointhesaga.com expenses (especially now that I’ve got a baby to worry about!), I decided to take the leap and move the website to Linode.com as well. I’ve been paying for a lot of bandwidth on Linode that simply hasn’t been used. We were rarely breaking 10 percent on CPU usage on our Neidermeyer server.

With a lot of help from Newt, the website migrated from Register to Linode over the past weekend. He helped fix some things I broke and ensured that I updated the forum software and Wiki to their most current versions, and then helped fix what broke when the upgrades were installed.

Thanks to Newt, those hosting costs are cut in half and the website’s potential has effectively doubled, as having the game database and the website on the same server may allow us to do some interesting things on the web.

More on that as we cross those bridges.

Thanks for sticking with OtherSpace through the changes!