Larry (@lhalff) and I have been recording a podcast for the past year called Citizen Garden that covers various topics related to the web, technology, and social networking.

Well, given Ma.gnolia’s recent catastrophe, we decided that episode 11 would dedicated to exactly what went down and why, and what lessons Larry has learned that others should heed in order to avoid facing a similar crisis.

I think the basic take-away is that, four years ago, when Larry started Ma.gnolia, your IT options were pretty much to use commodity shared hosting or to do it yourself. If you used Ruby on Rails — in which Ma.gnolia is written — your options were even more limited. And so Larry chose to do it himself.