Hosting a web site (especially one that you pay for, like this one), can be a source of joy and fulfillment, or a source of anger and helplessness, depending entirely on one thing: your hosting company.
A web host is essentially a landlord for virtual space; where a landlord provides shelter, power, and water, a web host provides hard drive space, email, and makes sure the site stays “up.” A server going down is the equivalent to having your power go out, and the worst possible (but most common) result is that anyone trying to visit your web site gets an unintelligible error message, and thinks your site has folded, or that you are incompetent, or both.
With my last host (who shall remain nameless unless they do not refund my most recent fees, as promised) my site went down repeatedly, email was often unavailable, and every time I wanted to upload some new design, the FTP server (the file transfer doohickey) was busted.
Their email support would often take weeks to respond, if they responded at all. So after a year without getting a particularly serious problem fixed, and two consecutive weekends where my site was down, I flew by night to another host: FutureQuest.net.
The funny thing is that their web site is decidedly un-flash. The pages are full of geek-speak and references to problems and solutions that only hardcore webmasters would appreciate.
I was among my people.
They also came heavily recommended on many independent forums and articles, so I decided to bite the bullet
and give them a try.
So far the move has been painless. I just copied the files over and everything worked, with a few minor (and predictable) edits to some files.
This is, of course, all part of my long-term plan for world domination.
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