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Apr 16

General

Running public web site from your basement is unprofessional. I know that. For a couple years I'm running my own internet facing toy server at home as a sandbox project. Let me tell you - I'm still working on that 99.99999% uptime. 5-6 times a year my house loosing power, sometimes it comes back right away but it doesn't matter - server is going down and patiently awaiting me coming back from work. This alone means realistically 40-50 hours downtime a year. Sometimes it looks like my ISP goes down, too (may be he also running from the basement?) and I have to reset router to be able to connect again. Yet dependency on external DNS (I use DYNDns). And don't forget that you'll need to maintain it, patch, upgrade software, install new stuff with many-many reboots when you counting it year long. All that put together, and you got totally unreliable site that is constantly, chronically down.

This Is why when I decided to blog first thing I did was go shopping for a host. I found GoDaddy with features I needed for a good price and never looked back. Very reliable asp.net 2.0 hosting. Now I have a need to move into 3.5 world (not yet for this site) and I start looking for a way to upgrade. And found that hosts not without weaknesses on their own. In my case, to upgrade to 3.5 I'd have first to cancel 2.0 account. Then sign up for new 3.5 account. Wait for new account activation and move my stuff in there. Even if everything will go smoothly (and it rarely does), it means at least a day or two out of business. That sucks - this defeats whole purpose of having stable and reliable web hosting. Why the hell do I need a host then?

I'm seriously thinking about investing into backup battery and crash course in system administration for my 3.5 year old kid (he is pretty sharp for his age and already comfortable with Xbox).

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Comments

4/17/2008 12:29:51 AM

Have a look at developer shared hosting CrystalTech. 2.95 pm w/ .NET 3.5 support.

Manoj

4/18/2008 6:10:14 AM

Couldn't you just open a new 3.5 account transfer your site(s) and then when everything is ready, point the domains to the new site(s)? Once it is running off the 3.5 account, you can cancel the 2.0 account. You'd pay for an extra month, but it seems worth it to me.

I use webhost4life and when I wanted 3.5 I just asked them to install it for my server and they did.

Al Nyveldt

4/18/2008 6:43:03 AM

Couldn't you just open a new 3.5 account transfer your site(s) and then when everything is ready, point the domains to the new site(s)? Once it is running off the 3.5 account, you can cancel the 2.0 account.
Seems so logical, isn't it? That was exactly my question to tech support. The answer was "no". You need to cancel 2.0 first - or you will not get reimbursed (and I was dumb enough to pay for the whole year up front. Valuable lesson here...).
Is this just me or everybody has this issue? Every time I look up a word in Firefox spell checker, it gives me a least that has almost nothing in common with one that misspelled. Where are they pulling it from??

rtur.net

4/21/2008 9:47:57 PM

I tend to host my own website out of my house too. I agree with you, the random downtime issues are very unprofessional, yet I look at it from the ROI perspective. I get nothing from blogging (other than connecting with people on the internet), so why should it cost me anything more than having a box setup in my basement.

As for shared hosting, my biggest problem with all of them is that they choose to not use virtualization. If more companies virtualized their shared hosting solutions, the price would go down and it would be a win-win situation. If a server was virtualized you would not have to lock it down because a customer would have their own VM and if they screwed it up it's their fault.

I tend to do a large amount of customization and server configurations, shared hosting just does not work for me. Although, if you find something cheap and good in shared hosting I would like to know too!

Justin Wendlandt

4/22/2008 7:02:12 PM

So far, I would always start with server and end up with development machine bloated with all kind of betas and eventually crashing under it's own weight with hard drive only reformatting can save.

rtur.net

4/24/2008 4:57:52 PM

I hear ya, brotha. I host my own blog as well. The only problems I have had thus far (since October of last year) is with my ISP. They were down for about 12 hours a couple weeks ago. I've had no issues with anything else, other than these damn foreign trackback spammers trying to take over my database (they were of course unsuccessful, but still, plenty of resources were wasted in determining their legitimation).

Until I get enough traffic to warrant remote hosting, I will continue to be a control-freak. And I recommend you do the same, because it's so fun being in charge!

Josh Stodola

5/2/2008 4:20:54 AM

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