My new hosting provider,, textdrive was down for two days. Today dreamhost (which serves up download.openlaszlo.org and Scott Evans' blog went down for eight days straight. Jumpline hasn't ever had any downtime that I noticed, in three years of using it, but there webapp for controlling things was really out of hand bad; the equivalent of voicemail hell. Sarah Allen likes mediatemple, but she's got some sort of relationship with the CTO... and it looks like it's down right now. I'm not sure who hosts Adam Wolff's blog, (but he'll probably see this post because I mention his name). The heavy-hitters I know host their own servers at colos. But come on, I'm just a minor netizen. I want to post my blog and some photos and some swf's. I have this illusion that maybe someday I will want to post a Ruby on Rails app, but really, it hasn't happened yet. However, I think it's crucial that my site is served from my own top-level domain. Maybe Apple has the solution; $99 a year for .mac is not bad compared to $8-$200 a month for downtime-o-rama. Apple software just makes me happy; maybe Apple hosting will, too.
And look, for the record, I can set up my own linux box for development, but I know that I don't know enough to protect a server from all the malware in the world.
I don't think my demands are particularly outrageous, except perhaps that i want all this for less than $200 a year. I'll hang out with TextDrive for a while, maybe actually get a RoR app up.
Maybe this should start being a perk that medium and large businesses can start offering to employees. Companys pay for cel phones and laptops, right? My manager has a few times suggested that I blog on one topic or another -- and the essays that turn up i our blogs are a hell of a lot more readable, opinionated, useful, and timely than the http://wiki.openlaszlo.org which does get quite a bit of atention from the OpenLaszlo team. Email is not enough, people. Corporate IT now takes it as a matter of course that they must maintain email, networking, backups, and applications. I propose that corporate IT also begins supporting the digitial lifestyle of the technorati by solving the "where do I host my blog" problem fof me.