What’s that old adage? When it rains it pours. Well, in my case it’s pouring…pouring design jobs. GrandmasterB has become extremely busy over the past week with new design projects coming through the door. Shortly after the release of last week’s review post, I was hired to design the header you see above for the popular French basketball forums Basket4Life. Antoine has been great to work with and I definitely appreciate his business. I am currently working on another design for his header as well, that has a little more “urban” feel to the font. I’m thinking about digging into the Go Vandal font for this one.

I am also hard at work on another client project; however, he has asked me to keep it a secret until it’s ready to lauch…so we’ll have to wait to release any news regarding that project. You won’t have to wait too long though, as we’re scheduling the launch for next week (November 3rd).

All of this work is really great and I’m loving all of the feedback that I’m receiving. Jeff and I are trying to utilize the little bit of free time we have to get our website (BlogFixers.com) online too. That’s the drawback to having tons of work to do…no time for the personal projects. Speaking of personal projects, I had been hinting about a secret project for awhile now that I’d been working on. I wanted to have it launched by November 1st, but with all of the other projects going on it’s been pushed back to at least January 1, 2009. I have tried to figure out a way to get it done, but client work comes first. I’ll probably keep working at it here and there when time permits; however, I don’t want to rush it (or client work) just to get it done.

In Other News

I did manage to find time to sign up for new hosting with Media Temple last week. I went small for now and signed up for their Grid-Service hosting, and I am very happy with them. For my hard earned $20/month I get quite a bit:

  • 100GB Disk Space
  • 1 TB Bandwidth
  • Host up to 100 Domains
  • Access to MySQL, Django and Rails Container Services
  • Shell Access
  • …and a lot more

I had been with Top Hosting Center for quite awhile, but I lost faith in their ability to host my site. I know that my site is small in comparison, but Cuzoogle had nothing but issues with them and has also moved to Media Temple. The biggest issue that I had with THC is that their support was only via chat. If your site lost connection to the database server (which happened a lot), you had to wait for the lone support guy to answer your chat request. Needless to say, it got old quick and I had to part ways. I wanted to be with a hosting company that could handle the small sites as well as the large…Media Temple was the obvious solution for me.

I should be able to grow the GMB Network on Media Temple, and if I get too big for the Grid Service I can move up to a Dedicated Virtual plan. One other note on moving my hosting, I also setup an account on the Amazon AWS to remotely backup my sites. After reading a tutorial by Christina Warren, I setup the necessary software and a shell script to do automatic backups of my site daily. The script took about 10 minutes to setup and another five minutes to setup my S3 account…after that it was all butter. Now every night at 1am my script runs and backs up the three sites I have on it, and uploads the zipped files to the Amazon S3 hosting. I’ve been running the S3 account for about two weeks now, and my bill is only 33 cents. If you want to backup your site automatically and have CPanel hosting checkout this tutorial.

Well, that’s all for this weeks review post, I have to get back to work on the redesign of…oops, I almost spilled the beans. I just need to get back to work…haha.

~ GrandmasterB