Over the past few months, I’ve had horrid problems with several of my websites hosted with Dreamhost. Pages hung without loading, or were very slow during peak periods. Server loads were regularly over 120.0, and were about 40.0 at their lowest. Today, that all changed! I talked with Michael, an administrator a Dreamhost, and he helped move all of my sites onto a new server. Everything now runs perfectly, and is very fast. Yay Dreamhost!

So, I started poking around on the new server I’m installed on. The server is called colbert.dreamhost.com and has only three users: root, me and a user called colberteagle. Hmm, interesting. Well, it ends up that the server hosts colbertnation.com, the official website of The Colbert Report. That’s crazy–I’m the sole neighbor of Stephen Colbert himself! To prove it, here’s a screenshot of a directory listing on the server, showing only the three users. Also, some handy links to my forward and reverse DNS entries.

• Directory Listing on New Server
• Forward DNS resolution of jsharkey.org
• Reverse DNS lookup back to colbert.dreamhost.com

Continuing to look around, the server has 2GB RAM and is a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors. For now I’m only sharing it with one other website, and the server load has yet to go over 1.0 all day long. Very sweet!