feeling listless

Site News Evening. Thank you to all the nice people who contacted me regarding the possible demise of the weblog because of 'hosting issues'. That's Nick, Robbie, Vicky, Meike, Alfvaen and especially Martin Lang, who emailed this extremely useful and expressive article about the challenges of selecting the right webhost. He's very kindly agreed to let me post it here so that others might benefit:

choosing a webhost is one of the biggest pains in the ass i can imagine -- you want one that is cheap but not 'shoddy', and you want good customer support.

when i was recently shopping for a webhost, one technique i used was to check out the webhosts used by online personalities i like/admire. they often mention their webhosts in the 'about' or 'technical' or 'colophon' or whatever section of their website. but if they don't, you can usually find out who their host is by running whois queries on their domains (through network solutions: http://netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois) and noting the 'technical contact' field (which will often be support personnel at their hosting company) and/or the 'domain servers' field.

for example, let's look at my whois entry: http://netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=surfaceparking.com&SearchType=do (it's useless looking at my website since there's nothing up at the moment). you can see that my technical contact has an email address at 'pair.com' and that my domain servers ALSO run through 'pair.com'. so if you point your web browser at http://www.pair.com, guess what? you've found my webhost.

or, if you want to get freaky, you can plug my personal address into map quest and then click over to the aerial photo tab and then zoom in for a nice view of the house where my parents live. (the whois database is a little bit frightening, however useful it may be.)

anyway, the three 'for pay' webhosts that i recommend you check out are modwest (http://www.modwest.com), pair (http://www.pair.com), and dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com).

christine castro of http://www.maganda.org uses modwest (she indicates so at the bottom of her homepage) which looks to be very good and VERY reasonably priced. i very nearly signed up with them myself.

i've been very happy with pair. priced in between modwest and dreamhost, they're extremely reliable and they do everything decently, including customer support. the 'feeling' i get from pair, sort of the 'brand identity', is 'dreamhost for grown-ups'. matt haughey used to host with pair before he moved all of his personal sites onto the metafilter box.

dreamhost is, of course, ubiquitous in the blogging world - and they deserve to be. reasonably priced and with excellent customer support, they attract many 'webmasters' making their first jump from free to pay hosting. i used to host with them and never had any complaints. heather champ of http://www.harrumph.com still uses them.

fwiw, all three of these hosts also provide domain registration services.

On the home front, I was working on a solution tonight (in between watch a double bill of documentaries about why the World Trade Centre collapsed and a langerie company is successful -- welcome the BBC TWO evening line-up everyone). This time it's right. It will work. And no one will have to be nailed to anything. You'll notice over the next few weeks that the material in those 'portal' pages will be migrating over to the weblog. I finally worked out how to make my archives viable (always been slow on the uptake) so on my non-weblogging days they'll be appearing in special edition format. As George Lucas is always saying 'Well I was never completely happy with them in the original format so I thought I would bring new technological advance to bare etc etc etc...'