Ok, so for YEARs I've been in one form or another of free colocated box. I ran my own for about 3 years and then for the last 3 years I've been pooled with some friends on a box I lazily don't have to lift a finger to admin.
Some friends have suggested DreamHost as a possible new home for this blog and others have suggested TextDrive and while I don't see anything actively wrong with either of them, I tried to hit DreamHost's homepage off and on for several hours yesterday and they seemed to be slashdotted. Needless to say, this doesn't impress me in a place I'd be putting my own piddly website no matter how much of a self care user interface they've got built.
TextDrive, by contrast has an "all the cool kids are playing here" sort of allure since the founders are all open source geeks and they're begging for mini-angel investors promising lifetime hosting. I can't decide whether trading potential lack of service for lifetime hosting is ok. Is this a save-by-spending idea that will pay off or is this stupid? If this weren't a potentially buy-once-never-worry-about-it-again sort of deal, I would just make a choice and be done, but 500 bucks is 3- 4 years worth of hosting money. I have to be there a good long time to make it a worthy expendature.
The third possibility to complicate this matter further is that I can get my old free colo space back, I just can't do it for another couple of months. Of course, then I have to admin the box and I have exactly no time for patches or upgrades and this domain's availability is no longer just a nice-to-have for me. Oh... and I'd have to buy a box which would probably cost at least as much as lifetime TextDrive.
Thoughts? If you read this via lj feed, I'll look for comments there, otherwise anything sent to my firstname at this site .org gets to me. No, I don't turn on comments. It's just another place for spam to pile up. Will let people know how this decision plays out since some of you are also about to become refugees from the great dissonant.org shutdown.
Posted by karen at January 22, 2006 04:17 PM