Since the beginning of the project, we’ve been running our own web server. After a significant number of local service outages on the part of Time Warner this year, particularly in July, we finally decided that had to change.

As of today, we’re running on Dreamhost. Dreamhost isn’t perfect, but they offer a nice package of services, reasonably good support and, with the right promo code, the price was right. So we’re going to give it a try for a while.

Moving from a host where we had complete control of the Apache and MySql servers to a shared host where we don’t has required some minor configuration changes to the blog and the wiki, and some significant changes to trac and subversion, but no changes to the Registry. As a side effect of the wiki tweak, we can have prettier URLs — http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page becomes http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/Main_Page. Links will default to the new style, although the older form will still work in order to keep older bookmarks working too.

We updated trac and subversion to the latest stable releases, moved trac from a lighttpd server to Apache and moved subversion from a subversion server to Apache as well. This has changed the user authentication process for both services, hopefully for the better.