Carol asks why I stopped hosting the website myself – seems like a good topic for a blog entry. :)

I originally ran the server from home for two main reasons: I wanted full control over installations and server issues, and I needed more space than hosting companies at the time could affordably provide. The main downside when I first started up the server was that the download speeds could be very slow, since we had a pretty slow Earthlink connection. We shelled out for some extra speed with a different DSL provider (Speakeasy), and basically wound up paying an extra $40 a month for the privilege of hosting our own server.

I enjoyed it though – no need to wait for user support if I needed something fixed, I got to practice lots of sysadmin stuff, and I was able to configure everything exactly how I wanted to.

Recently, though, it’s been getting a little slow. Even with the “fast” uplink that we pay for, once you get a few users looking at photos or downloading movies the connection gets eaten up pretty quickly. So I started looking around at hosting companies again.

And, lo and behold, they’ve come a long way in 3 years. I can now get 200 GB of room for only $10 a month, and – the best part – I have shell access to my account, so I can log in and futz around with stuff on the command line. I can install my own software, manage my own databases, and even make most (possibly all) of the configuration changes I’d ever need to things like the web server, mail server, etc. It’s all done through web-based control panels which wrap my changes in all kinds of levels of security, but it works. So far I have yet to find anything I can’t do with my Dreamhost account that I could with my own server.

And what’s been even more surprising is their great response to user tickets. So far I’ve had exactly two problems: one required an actual configuration fix at their end, the other was just something I didn’t know how to do. In both cases I heard back within an hour with a fix.

So – faster, cheaper, still plenty flexible, tons of disk space… I have yet to encounter a downside. But I’ll let you know if one ever rears its head. If all goes well in the next month or two, we’ll be able to shut off our noisy server in the office and stop paying the extra cash to Speakeasy every month. That seems worth the day or two of hassle involved moving over all my databases and files.