To host or not to host
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).
