Clarification: “Please don’t let it die :(“

28 May 2007

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? BadTimesâ„¢). But that barely affects publishing so… nothing is dying.