This is the official announcement that the Blue Pyramid has moved from Tennessee to Utah. In the early morning hours of this very day, the Pyramid stole away from a state with an actual pyramid (though down the road in Memphis) to a state with… pyramid-shaped mountains?

The 1,808-mile journey took just a few hours (though it somehow took longer for these changes to be recognized in Chicago).

This post, of course, is referring to the actual physical location of the Blue Pyramid, which is a very small section of disk space on a server. The internet collectively likes to avoid open acknowledgement of the fact that it actually does physically exist somewhere. Indeed, the nature of the internet’s ethereality and widespread accessibility is one of the things I like most about it, both in reality and as a metaphor for the very lives we ourselves are leading. The physical is the least important of all dimensions, or at least the most overrated. But it is there, and worth noting from time to time.

If you’re wondering what’s in Cleveland, Tennessee, it’s Coastland Technologies, who I am even now (though that will soon be taken down) promoting on the BP’s front page. The BP has been on CoastlandTech since its inception in January 2002, and it’s really hard to let go of the relationship I’ve had with them. I would still recommend them to anyone who is just starting out and doesn’t need much space.

But I do need space, and space is so ridiculously cheap right now that it just doesn’t make sense to hold onto a 150 MB limit. CT starts you out with a 50 MB limit, and I was able to negotiate an extra 100 MB for only one extra annual charge in exchange for the link on the front page. I’ve spent much of the last month butting my head against that ceiling, and eventually I just had to break free. By contrast, I now have 300 GB (yes, with a G) for about $3 more a year (2-year commitment). For 1 GB at CT, I would’ve had to shell out $20/month, as opposed to $6 at HM for 300 (making CT literally exactly 1,000 times as expensive at the GB level). Please note that this does not mean CT is a bad deal if you don’t need much space, but it is if you want more.

I’m now with HostMonster, who I discovered when we were looking for a new high-bandwidth home for the Mep Report around this time last year. I used that year as a bit of a trial-run of HM and I’ve been generally pleased. One of my main reasons for picking HM besides the overall package and price is that I like Utah as a physical location. Not to live, but to be secure. You may think a website’s physical spot doesn’t matter, but when the chips are down, it really can. Dreamhost was looking like a great option until a heat wave sparked power outages that brought one of the most popular set of servers on the planet crashing down for days. (Remember the day MySpace was out? Yeah, that was Dreamhost. Not on MySpace? All you need to know was that this was a very big, expensive deal.)

Utah is about the best place I could possibly imagine for keeping a server safe. There are no earthquakes, no floods, no tornadoes, no hurricanes. It gets cold, but not absurdly so, and servers tend to like cold. It is extremely unlikely that Utah will get nuked in my lifetime. Pretty much the biggest threat to Utah servers has to be some sort of breakaway movement or revolution in the state, but they would probably quickly negotiate favorable trade agreements with the United States thereafter being, as they are, surrounded and economically dependent on the big country.

So now the only issue is how to fill this massive amount of space. I have become so accustomed to running web projects on the barest of byte-budgets that I can’t fathom how much room I have to grow (I have literally 2,000 times the space I used to). At the same time, budgeting byte-usage can be a good tactic on the web, since every byte has to be downloaded, sometimes by people on (gasp!) dial-up or other slow connections. Part of the BP’s ability to be user-friendly has certainly related to quick loading times.

In the meantime, please let me know if anything was dropped in the transfer. If any part of the BP is not functioning properly, an internal link doesn’t work, or something’s just missing, please give me a heads-up. Moving 1,808 miles is pretty seamless on the web, but it wasn’t necessarily perfect. And I’ll get to work on updating all the parts of the BP that aren’t quite accurate anymore…