thebogles.com is now up and running on a dedicated machine hosted by ServerPronto.com. My previous host, python-hosting.com, had served me well as a shared host for this site, but I was beginning to need root level access to do some of the things I wanted to do.

In my survey of the options out there, ServerPronto was unique in offering a dedicated server at $30 a month, which almost seems to be too good to be true. That includes 200GB of traffic a month on a 100MB connection. The server itself is on the low end– 256MB of RAM, 40GB harddrive, but considering that’s all mine and I can run a lean Linux distribution that’s adequate for my needs.

So far, everything has gone quite well. The system was deployed for me within a single business day and was speced as advertised.

What’s the catch? I’ve seen complaints on discussion that ServerPronto isn’t good about answering emails and requests for support. If you need support, ServerPronto may not be a good choice, but if you can administer your own machine they are a uniquely affordable option.

Jobster has raised $19.5 Million in venture capital funding capital in a round led by Mayfield and joined by our existing investors Ignition Partner and Trinity Ventures.

We’re delighted to welcome Allen Morgan to our board, joining John Connors and Jon Anderson from Ignition and Patricia Nakache from Trinity.

I’m personally excited by this because it will allow us to attack the full range of technical challenges in the targeted job advertising and recruiting space.

Helping companies go beyond active jobseekers means helping them to connect with high quality professionals wherever they are on the internet. Doing this right involves a whole range of challenges.

For instance, we need to help companies rank prospects based on their connections to the company and fit for the job, maintain relationships with tens or hundreds of thousands of professionals in a talent network, target their positions to the right places on the internet, and measure the effectiveness of various online sources.

Conversely, we need to help professionals stand out from the crowd and get noticed for the right jobs. Finding job listings is easy– getting past resume spam and standing out is the hard part. Leveraging trusted relationships to the company is one way to do this, and we will be layering on a number of other paths over time that will help the best rise to the top.

Online job classifieds are a frictionless but broken marketplace for both companies and professionals, filled with both resume spam and job spam. Companies spend billions advertising their jobs with a low return on investment.

The solution is not just aggregating more and more jobs– the solution is fixing the marketplace itself. Technical innovation provides us the path to do so.