Dreamhost

One of the things that I often forget as a website developer is that, as a freelancer who also offers hosting, I also have to worry about my client’s email service. One thing that is particularly painful is taking over a client and having to migrate their email from one server to another.

As part of my Dreamhost to Linode server migration, one of my most dreaded tasks that I encountered was moving my client’s email to the new server or somewhere else. Particularly those who leave several gigabytes worth of email on the server.

The problem is simple, I want to move my and my client's sites away from Dreamhost into an environment where I have more control over the server software running the sites. A little over two years ago, Dreamhost started (and rightfully so) retiring older versions of PHP on both its Shared and Virtual Private Server hosting services. This caused me to have to go, metaphorical hat in hand, to a number of clients and inform them that their opensource web-based productivity tools are going to stop working without intervention on my part.