Blogging Roller

After devastating Grenada as only a category 3, Ivan is now a rare category 5 hurricane and has its sights set on Jamaica. Evacuation is not an option for most of the 2.5 million residents. Let's hope Ivan loses strength, veers off course, and aims at some less populated area.

What was I doing in 1993? That the year that my short stint as an independent GIS consultant came to an end. In December 1992, my wife Andi and I returned from our year and a half in Jamaica where I had been working as a GRASS GIS consultant. We moved to my hometown Chapel Hill, NC and I was hoping that I could continue working there as an independent consultant.

Before I left Jamaica, I landed a contract with the Open GIS Foundation and the Univ. of California Berkeley to develop a X-Windows based raster editor for GRASS. I wanted to find more work like that, but I just didn't have the contacts needed to continue consulting on my own. By July 1993, I had accepted a great job with the GIS group at NYNEX Science and Technology (now part of Verizon) in White Plains, NY.

After writing this up, I was browsing the pages for Berkeley's REGIS program and learned some sad news. The kind person who I worked for at Berkeley and who offered me a job there back in 1993, Kenn Gardels, passed away in 1999 at the age of 44.

If you've been following Blogging Roller for long, you know what a terrible time I had with CQHost, my previous Servlet ISP.  CQHost was cheap at $12.50 per month, but the technical support was terrible, the server manager software was broken, and the Servlet engine spent more time down than up.  After a week or so of constant server crashes and daily trouble-tickets, CQHost actually blamed my Roller software for the crashes and I knew it was time to leave.

I had been following a thread on Servet ISPs at the Java Lobby, so I already had a short-list of ISP alternatives.  Luckily, Kattare was on that list.  After reading the rave reviews of Kattare in the Servlets.COM ISP list, I signed up for Kattare's Level 3.1 plan for $29 per month.  The plan includes 100mb storage, 4 mailboxes, private Tomcat JVM, MySQL, FTP/SCP, Telnet/SSH, and lots more.

Kattare had me up and running in hours and they answered my every question with a thoughtful and informative reply.   Their systems are fast, well configured, and stable.  Roller has been running at Kattare for a week now and I have have not experienced one server crash, outage, or other inconvenience.   So, if you are looking for a place to host your Roller-based weblog (or any other webapp) look no farther than Kättare Internet Services.