Bye Bye Chiweta. It’s been fun and real, but no longer real fun.

I needed you and you came through. Thanks for everything.

You were just a lowly WHM reseller server, but you were good to me. It’s time to say goodbye.

This is part of a series of posts about closing down a business, finishing an era, saying goodbye the past and moving on.

No one, well, maybe one person, is going to get this post. But no matter. Here’s all you need to know: when you’re moving on from one place to another in your work, your life, your relationships, take the time to bid the past farewell.

Chiweta is a town in the country of Malawi in eastern Africa. We went through there on our trek through Africa. You can see Likoma in the map below, bottom right, the namesake of the design agency I ran for a decade.

Now two years after having closed down that business, I can finally look back with a warm heart and less frustration. It was a good run, we had (mostly) really great clients, and we helped out lots and lots of small businesses.

We needed servers to host the hundreds of websites we managed. For each server, you need a domain name. I looked back at maps of Malawi and figured I’d keep it “in the family” of Likoma and scouted names of towns or islands around Likoma. Thus the servers became:

1. Chizumulu
2. Chiweta
3. Chinyanya
4. Chipyela

Now closing down server #2, Chiweta, only Chizumulu remains. I still have a few dozen sites left there but I’ll be moving them over the new, Managed WordPress Hosting (that I also manage–but much more hands off!) and the era of the “chi-” names from Malawi will be but a sliver of history.

I’m sure those towns will be waiting to get their hands on the .com domain names. 😉

It’s down to you, Chizumulu. Long live Malawi and may Likoma live on in our hearts and under the warm sun of Africa.

This is the dashboard that Chiweta had. Yeah, much less interesting than the map of the east-African country, but still, it served its purpose. Let’s just say I won’t exactly miss the dashboard of outages and bandwidth and server status.

Bye bye, Chiweta!

I’m going to be saving the costs of the hosting fee every month. You’d think that’d be great to add to my savings, but I’m about ready to spend it and I know exactly where that will go: Teachable.