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October 1st 2003 in the afternoon
Well, my web address is up and running happily but emailing me for the next few
days may be hit or miss. Dreamhost shot apart the last of my good graces last
night when they inexplicably let their own domain expire. Unfortunately for those
of us under their care, our MX mail server records were left pointing at unresolvable
mail servers by their memory lapse. They were quick to update all records to dreamhost.net
(which thankfully is still a valid domain), but due to the distributed nature
of DNS it could take a few more days for things to stabilize. I think the real
question is: How the hell does an ISP forget to renew their domain? For the love
of god, that’s one of the services you offer to your clients: Domain renewal!
All this comes on the heels of my decision to move my mail over to their mail
servers. I guess it’s time to move my mail again … to someone else’s
mail servers. Ironically, I started this move in an effort to get some of my mail
functionality off of my SDSL supported Linux server at home for fear that DSL
was not reliable enough to support a mail server. In hindsight, that little server
running on Megapath’s network has done better in uptime than either Dreamhost
(who hosts kellegous.com) or Bellsouth’s eBusiness Center (which hosts Connexxia’s
corporate servers).
I am not set up to scale to generic hosting. I have a feeling there is a marked drop in quality of service when you make that transition. As it is, I spend a fair amount of my time making sure BIND has the latest patch or checking to see if ProFTPd has taken a holiday and is spinlocking one of my servers. I can't imagine what a large ISP must deal with, or how those that offer ssh accounts do so without getting themselves pwn3d down to the router level.
All that having been said, anecdotal evidence (from the numbers of people who keep asking for ISP-style hosting from me) is that the existing businesses are doing a really weak job of it.
Maybe it *is* rocket science, and the $25/month figure is the problem. Perhaps spending more gets you more... it did for me, but I have to manage it myself.
1. It's a shame there isn't better (symmetric) DSL/cable service. I'd gladly drop my hosting company, and add $25/month to my DSL bill if I could use it as a line for hosting AN.
2. With all the people out there with personal web pages/blogs, you would think that someone would build a self-contained, low power, cheap web server. Sort of like an answering machine for the web. Ok, so Linksys is probably working on this already, but surely there's got to be a better solution than me leaving an old drone PC on all the time.
One of these days..