Summary - Expect a minor bump or two in the week ahead, but it shouldn't be anything major.
Background - My web content has been all over the place since 2000, especially in the early years. When I first started, I was hand crafted things at my mv.com site. It was mainly a place to put pictures of the new twins. Later I migrated to livejournal.com, but didn't like the lack of control about how the site worked. I switched over to using MovableType software but hosting it from our old iMac at home. In June 2003 when Adelphia explicitly blocked it, I quickly moved the software and content to a small webhosting facility called Cornerhost. They came highly recommended at the time. I've been there for many years now.
Problem - For over a year now Cornerhost has been unreliable. The problem is the way that it was originally architected is suffering. It was built the classic way with one server hosting websites and email for a few hundred customers.
The problem has been the huge flood of email spam is killing the servers. We've always had spam but in the past couple of years it has become huge. You probably don't notice it because the big guys (verizon, att, msn, yahoo, gmail, etc.) have become fairly adept at stopping it before it ever gets to your inbox. Then if they have something questionable it goes into your junk/spam folder.
Since cornerhost puts its email and web serving on the same server, those servers are busting at the seems. Michelle has complained that she can't send email at times. Many mornings I double check the website and see that it isn't available. I've been patient and spoken with the provider but nothing significant has turned the tables. I pay $200 a year for a host that sometimes can't send email and servers that can't display my stuff.
Considerations - I've been working towards a solution for a few months now. If I was going to make a change, I wanted a change that would save money. I'll give you some idea at things I considered.
I looked into using Amazon S3 services to hold the content. That had a geeky appeal to it because it would be redundant servers "in the cloud". It would be as reliable as surfing Amazon or Google. You know that if you can't reach those two services, your internet must be down and not them. Unfortunately putting content onto Amazon's S3 services is a bit clunky.
From there I tried something else that was geeky: putting the content on a Chumby in our house. This actually worked amazingly well. The Chumby is always on, only uses 4 watts, and is 100% solid state (ie. no spinning hard drives to fail). I got this all working and was about to throw the switch but one thing bothered me. What if Comcast decided to do what Adelphia did to me years ago and actively block me? What if they didn't block me but used the server as an excuse to shut down my broadband service? I need that service for when I work remotely from home. I investigated their terms of service and found the following restriction:
use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers.
Solution - I think that I found a solution I am comfortable with. About a month ago I switched the provider for our email. I had read good things about fastmail.fm as a "for pay" email provider. The nice thing about owning your own web domain is that you can assign who handles your email separately from who handles the web serving for your domain. So at the low network level I "pointed" bilikfamily.com email at fastmail's email servers. It was so painless I almost didn't believe it. Their services are as fast and reliable as gmail, yahoo, msn, etc. but with a clean look 100% uncluttered by ads of any kind.
So that took care of the email but what about the web content? Luckily fastmail also provides many gigabytes of web hosted file storage with generous bandwidth amounts. I like it that they don't pose with that fake "unlimited" bandwidth marketing bull. I've moved all the webposts and photo albums there and it works well. I've just got to move to the few directories that have audio and video.
Downsides - Static hosting is not exactly like my hosting at Cornerhost. I won't go into the details of why, but you won't be able to post a comment or write a webnote. Since these have not been used actively for the past year, I don't think you'll miss it. I may put in a link on each entry to email me with feedback. This already exists if you click on the link that says "Scott" in the header of each post but I don't think people noticed it.
Other scripts that I have running at Cornerhost will need some re-work. These include the birthdays, weather, Netflix, gospel, and saint scripts. Over time I'll probably get these all working again because I like them. If you remember, these were added incrementally over the past years, typically on evenings when I got bored and decided to add a new feature.
Conclusion - So as I said, this will likely happen in the next week or so. It should be more reliable but some things may look subtly different or missing. It should be painless and I'll work to restore some of the missing things in the months ahead.