Mark Mischke's Weblog

Ditching Web hosting

I've had a Web hosting provider for about ten years, maybe longer.  They hosted my personal site, sites for my friends, my business site, my discussion forum and my online running database.  Now they just host my business site, which probably averages zero-to-one hits per month.

My personal site has become my blog (does anyone actually _do_ personal Web sites anymore??), which is hosted by a different provider.  I no longer use my Web host for e-mail, as it was unreliable.  I now have a separate e-mail host.

Web hosting runs me $23/month, which isn't a large amount, but I'm just not using it.  I've resisted bailing because of the historical 'geek factor' of having a hosting provider, but I can no longer justify it.  It's time to kick it to the curb.  I'll keep my domains, of course, all too many of them.  :-)

I'm a little sad about it.  Personal Web sites used to be considered kinda cool, but somewhere along the way too many of them sunk into the realm of the pitiful.  I manage the DNS entries for my domains, so I can redirect them anywhere I like.  Cable Internet has become a LOT more reliable than it was during the early days, with the big, heavy metal routers.  I never experience downtime now, not that my 0-1 viewers per month would notice.  I figure I can host on my home server.

I know some folks who still hang onto their world.std.com shell accounts (you know who you are).  It's hard to let go of things which have served us so well for so long.  I gave up my shell account years ago, along with my CompuServe account and a bunch of other geek merit badge subscriptions which had reached their useful limit.  I think I'm ready to move on.  Perhaps ten years from now we'll be fondly reminiscing about oldstyle cable Internet.  :-)

Finally... silence

My quest for a quiet, high-performance desktop machine began in early 2005.  I bought a Lian Li case, two quiet Seagate SATA drives and a silent power supply.  Completion of the project (motherboard, CPU & memory) was complicated by the fact that 1) it was damn near impossible to keep a Pentium 4 box cool without making noise, and 2) Intel was talking about cooler P4s being just around the corner.  Also, a few vendors were testing the waters with Pentium M motherboards.  By the time the dust settled from all of this chatter, Intel was pushing the Core Duo, which combines the performance of a P4 with a thermal profile resembling that of a Pentium M - and with two cores.

My shiny silver Lian Li case still sits in my office, and has become just another flat surface on which to pile things (the pile is a much-maligned, but fairly efficient, organizational structure).  I've managed to quiet down my venerable P4 by selectively removing cooling fans, but it's still too loud.  This is _despite_ the expensive Zalman CPU cooler and 'silent' power supply.  My stethoscope (paper towel tube) reveals no single source for the remaining noise.  It's apparently just a summation of all the components.

Now that the (current) ultimate CPU, the Core 2 Duo, has been officially announced, I find myself with the perfect solution, but I no longer need it.  These days, I rarely power up the old P4 machine.  I do everything on my notebook.  I may just hold out for awhile and pick myself up a Core 2 Duo notebook late next year.  By then they'll be seasoned, faster and maufacturers will have learned how to incorporate them into cool (meaning low heat) designs.  If I'm really lucky, we'll be seeing OLED displays and cheap solid state drives by then, too, both of which should add up to impressive battery life.

Given that I do still have a nice 'foundation' box and some decent components in my 'legacy' P4 box (why does everything in the computer world become 'legacy' after 2-3 years??), I'll probably blend the components into something 1) a little quieter, and 2) more modern.  If money were no concern, I'd buy a Mac mini & deck it out with a Core 2 Duo and a 7200 RPM drive.  THAT would be pretty sweet.  But I'd still have my P4 kicking around doing nothing.  Can't have that...