###Corrections: 4% != .004% : When I was writing the article, my brain translated 99996 into 96000. Big difference. It turns out that I’m unable to dequeue somewhere between .004% and .20% of messages in about half of test runs. ###Note: I’ve been chatting with some very helpful RabbitMQ-knowledgeable people, and they have some suggestions for the issues I’m seeing that I’m going to check out. I will update this article with my findings.

Last night, I had a dream that I was telling a joke. It was a long one. I got almost all the way to the punchline before I woke up, and, thinking back on it, I had completely botched the setup. Shame on me. Here’s the joke: In eastern Europe, some time in the 15th century, there was a young rabbi. He was just out of training and was not ready to settle down, so he was wandering the countryside performing good deeds.

Sometimes, shit doesn’t work out. For example: Mike’s Hard Lemonade contacted me at the Southside Hackerspace, wanting us to modify a golf cart as part of their “Mike’s Hacks” summer ad campaign. I dumped a lot of time (and just a little money) into the project, but everything went south at the last minute. But this isn’t about that. At the same time, Mason Donahue put me in touch with Chicago Girls in Computing.

I know my site doesn’t exactly have any dedicated watchers, but if anyone noticed a period of downtime earlier this week, it’s because I was migrating from hosting on FatCow to hosting on a rented VPS through DigitalOcean. I also moved my domain registration from FatCow to Gandi.net. In this post, I plan to cover the hows, whys, and some lessons learned. I’ll start with the juicy stuff. Why? There are a couple of reasons, but the root of it all is that I got fed up with FatCow.