Found it! is an occasional blog series by ArtsPond Founder, Jessa Agilo. In this article, Jessa explores some of the ups and downs transitioning our websites for the first time from a shared hosting environment to a new Virtual Private Server. This work was both made possible, and also frustrated, by recent evolutions in Generative AI. The featured image for this article was created by Generative AI when prompted to celebrate the conclusion of major first steps in this journey.
After ten years of reliance on an affordable but relatively barebones shared web hosting plan, we’re thrilled (and a little exhausted!) to announce that we’ve officially transitioned to our very own Virtual Private Server (VPS) for ArtsPond.com and our other child sites.
This milestone may not mean much to you. For us, it marks a major change for our small but determined team. One that required us to roll up our sleeves and dive headfirst into the world of DevOps largely owned by massive global behemoths like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others.
Over the past year, we’ve cultivated entirely new skillsets to determine the best options for selecting cloud hosting services, and then building, and now managing our VPS from the ground up.
But let’s not sugarcoat it—this journey was anything but smooth. With more than 500 hours invested, countless failures, restarts, and a few spectacular crashes, it’s been a wild ride. If you noticed our websites going down a few times recently, well… now you know why!
While we still have a tremendous amount to learn, this transition to our own VPS was possible thanks to the support of Generative AI. It’s capacity to provide increasingly relevant and accessible directions around the development of new web systems architecture has improved considerably since we first started working with it a year ago. We didn’t have a budget to hire a DevOps professional from the start, so we rallied our courage and undertook the learnings ourselves.
As the one who has been leading and implementing this change, I have to say that this has been an incredibly thrilling but challenging experience. While Generative AI definitely got us here, there were a lot of unforced errors along the way where the technology provided bad or incorrect advice, or took elongated pathways when a more direct route was available. I didn’t know it then, but I do now. When I decided to become an arts manager full-time in 2005, did I see myself ever undertaking this level of control over web systems architecture? Heck no!
Admittedly, I have been interested in technology my entire life. My father was an early adopter in the first days of home computing including the Commodore 64 and Tandy Colour Computer. I still recall him spending over a thousand dollars on one of the first-ever dot-matrix black and white printers. He got me interested in dialing up to community bulletin boards over the phone and writing code from tape in my tweens. I originally taught myself the basics of web programming in my early adult years, and have been very comfortable working with host-managed Apache servers in a CPanel / Shared Hosting environment now for two decades. However, this levelling up to self-manage a VPS on Microsoft Azure has been beyond my comfort level many times. We chose Azure over others due to extensive credits for non-profits which is helping to reduce our current hosting costs down to $0 per year. While setting up for the first time on Azure is not for the faint of heart, the hardest days and nights of learning are finally behind us now. So onwards!
While things may look the same on the surface for now, behind the scenes we’re operating on a much more robust and flexible foundation. This VPS upgrade enables us to create new and interactive services that weren’t possible before.
In addition to the upcoming release of our open source arts management platform, Hatch Open (which is also on its own VPS), we are working towards releasing an array of interactive solutions that deepen the support and care we provide to our communities. For the most part, these new services to be added to ArtsPond.com are powered by open source and other third-party plugins that extend the capability of a WordPress backend which our current sites are using. Hatch Open, however, is very different, and is built on its own stack in Python.
What can you expect to come at ArtsPond.com?
- PondBook: An open platform for self-publishing books and other resources in the Creative Commons. Powered by WordPress and Pressbooks.
- PondFlow: A social network for gig workers in arts and culture. Powered by WordPress and PeepSo.
- PondHive: An e-learning platform for sharing courses and directed learning experiences. Powered by WordPress and LearnDash.
- PondKnow: A living repository of information, knowledge, and wisdom in arts and culture. Including toolkits, plans, glossaries, and other resources developed by ArtsPond. Powered by BookStack.
- PondLive: A housing and real estate listing board. Powered by WordPress.
- PondWork: An opportunities board and recruitment management portal for gigs, jobs, open calls, residencies, retreats, funding, volunteering, and more. Powered by WordPress and WP Job Manager.
Other opportunities including events listings, facilities profiles, and more are also in development using AirTable and others. For now, you can visit PondKnow to see our work on Wellsprings, our new Care Plan 2033. There is also a landing page with more information for PondBook. Stay tuned for further updates in 2025.
