This blog isn’t van­ish­ing off the face of the planet.

Quoth the con­cerned: “That’s like the only way I have of see­ing how you are most of the time now!” — which makes me almost as depressed as I was after my nos­tal­gia trip writ­ing the last post, because ‘the con­cerned’ is some­one who is also of fair sig­nif­i­cance to me. It’ll move, but not die.

I’ve got too many busi­ness cards with the address printed on it to let it die for another year or so ;-)

I spent a few hours today track­ing down a good web host after eval­u­at­ing DIY host­ing and decid­ing it almost cer­tainly wasn’t worth it, even with a sta­tic IP and remark­ably sta­ble ADSL2+ link (no, not just against 2003’s 256/64 PPPoE stan­dards!). I’ll be switch­ing this site across some­time in the next week or two, prob­a­bly at some arcane time of day that no-one will notice any­way because that’s just how I roll. It’s funny, because I’ll now be using the same host­ing my clients do… and I switched host­ing providers to do so. Seg­pub were great for a few months, but they’re just a lit­tle too expen­sive and inflex­i­ble for what they are — an Aussie com­pany doing good US host­ing. New provider is A Small Orange, who have a pos­i­tively yawn-inspiring web­site but get good press. I was so tempted by Site5 and Dreamhost’s absurd promises, but given none of this is going to come close to the reli­a­bil­ity of web host­ing on one server where the admin has an enor­mous vested inter­est in, it made sense to go with some­one smaller and more sen­si­ble. That, and I wanted to be con­fi­dent reselling it… now I might actu­ally start mak­ing some money out of my hand­ful of host­ing clients… just.

Host­ing for me is con­tin­u­ally about keep­ing peo­ple around to help them out with sup­port and pre­vent­ing them from wor­ry­ing about man­ag­ing the com­po­nent parts of their web ser­vices, more than any con­certed effort to make money. Even if I were to take it more seri­ously (i.e. actu­ally bill peo­ple on time, etc.) it would rarely amount to any­thing more than pocket money unless I really chased after a lot more clients than I care to single-handedly engage with… reselling host­ing is only prof­itable if you out­source sup­port to a bunch of geeky high school stu­dents with too much free time (that was me when I con­sid­ered reselling to be even slightly lucrative!) — ideally high school stu­dents who have never had a real job!

The biggest thing I’ll miss tech­ni­cally? Hav­ing a rel­a­tively local SSH box (low latency) with rel­a­tively per­mis­sive secu­rity (ever tried run­ning a text-mode browser on a Jail­rooted ter­mi­nal? Bad­Times™). But that barely affects pub­lish­ing so… noth­ing is dying.

Tags: Jailrooted terminal, United States, web host, web hosting, web services