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I started up picknit.com in 2003 on DreamHost. Like most budding web monkeys, I was long on plans and ideas, but short on time and motivation. It's only recently that I've started working on the site in earnest, but I always kept my personal email here. And email is really mission critical.

Which is why I ditched DreamHost in 2006. Overall, they're the slickest, most professional, and most cost-effective of the inexpensive hosting providers. But they keep having outages! There was a whole series of them in 2006; after several weeks of my email server being unavailable or sluggish as a beached whale, I moved on.

Alas, I've never found a hosting provider I've been really happy with. The low-end hosting marketplace is dominated by flakes and con artists. The serious professionals mostly don't find it worth their while to service anybody whose hosting budget is less than $100/month. My current provider, MediaTemple, is sort of an exception. For $20/month, I get shared hosting on a virtual server. If they have hardware downtime, they just move the virtual server to another system, and I see zero downtime.

But their support for customers at my tier is kind of half-hearted. It took me a while to figure out the configuration details from their sparse and inconsistent documentation. And their spam filter appears to be some homebrew nonsense that's not very tunable. That makes my spam white list crucial, and their control panel doesn't make white list maintenance easy.

So, I'm thinking of moving on. I thought of going back to DreamHost, but their outage problems remain unresolved. Liquid Web looks sort of promising, but that would mean going back to shared hosting on a physical server. They appear to be better at keeping their servers up than DreamHost, but still...

One solution is to host the site myself. My geek-friendly ISP, Speakeasy, gives me a free IP address, so it's doable without dynamic DNS gimmicks. I only have about 400 Mbps of upstream network capacity, but that will  do for now. If I ever start generating real traffic, I can rent some rack space somewhere.

But no, forget it. If my hardware fails my site is down until I straighten it out. Too much potential tsuris.

I've often thought of getting a virtual private server, which would end my dependence on the provider for getting the software features I need. I've balked at the cost (they start at $60/month) but perhaps I need to bite the bullet.

But wait! Here's an alternative: Slicehost is now offering VPSs for only $20 a month. The catch is that you're totally on your own for managing the thing. But maybe I want that. It fits in with the "learn by doing things the hard way" model that this web site is built around.


 

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• Webhost in five day server FAIL (go.theregister.com)

Web sites exist primarily to present content and/or serve online software applications. On picknit.com, there's a third purpose: teaching myself web technology.

Which means I'll often do things the hard way. I could have started this blog on a free blog host (there are quite a few), but I wouldn't learn nearly as much about blogging software. So I've spent the last few days fiddling with various versions of  Movable Type blogging software, and finally settling on the Open Source version of MT 4.33. I'll explain that choice (and also describe my brief experience with WordPress) in a later post.

I'm pretty happy with this version of Movable Type, but I don't plan to stay locked into it. I probably won't bother with other software that's primarily about blogging (unless it has some feature I really want to check out) but I plan to fiddle with various Web CMS solutions, and most of those have blogging support that I'll want to try.

You have to sign in to comment. (Sorry about that, but I don't have time for the usual online snipers and flame warriors.) But you don't have to register. In fact you can't. Instead, you log in using your user ID from Google, Live Journal, and a few other portals and blogging providers. Or if you have an OpenID URL, you can use that. Just click the "sign in" link and follow the instructions.

To do list: learn enough about Movable Type to do some drastic customization of its look and feel. In particular, this fixed-width layout has to go.

BUG!!!! MT comes with a plugin application called Zemanta, which (among other things) helps you find graphics to go with your blog entry. That's how I found the photo above, which a certain Steve Rhodes has been good enough to release with a Creative Commons license. Zemanta also embeds an info link for the image, but somehow I managed to change that link to point to openid.net -- and Zemanta seems to have permanently re-associated that image with the new URL. Uncool!