Hosting recommendations?


Looking for a spot to put macdude.com

Short version: I own two domains, macdude.com and shawniebear.com. shawniebear.com is one I bought for my wife, Shawn, and it's never been anything more than a placeholder. macdude.com was being hosted on a friend of a friend's box and it seems to have gone belly up. It's not reachable, the host isn't reachable and I want to regain control of it. I'm going to try to find another place at the same price (free), but I'm willing to pay if I can find the right spot. I can even come up with a Mac to host it.

Long version: Back in 1993 when I started working at ciscoSystems, I picked up the nickname "MacDude" because I was the only Macintosh sysadmin in a group of UNIX admins. At the time, the Internet was young (sidenote, check this report from the CBC on the Internet phenomenon.) and one of my co-workers pointed out that macdude.com was available. So I registered the domain and started a website. I had visions of making it as big as Macintouch, which also started serving web pages about the same time, but I never devoted the time to it.

Initially, the domain was hosted on a co-worker's system (nowhere.net) which in turn was hosted on mainstreet.com. I had root access and all was good. At some point about 5 years ago, nowhere.net moved to another box which was also hosting volition.org. It was no longer sitting on a box that was owned by someone I knew and I had to ask for simple things like password resets for my mom's email account, etc.. This initially wasn't a problem, but over time it has become one.

Around Christmas 2003, volition.org had its hard drive fill up (at least as far as I can tell from my vantage point) and then it went off-line. I've asked a couple of people who normally might know, but there is nothing forthcoming. I have backups of the website, but the mailserver isn't responding and anyone with a macdude.com email address is SOL (shouldn't that be SOOL?).

I also am somewhat disgruntled by iBlog's lack of progress and feature set. If I can find a box and a piece of network segment to call my own, I could run my own server for mail, webhosting and blog posting. I have an ADSL line at home, but that's not quite ready for two reasons: I am 15,000 feet from the CO and I have a "variable" IP address from SBC.

So, I'm looking for co-location recommendations. :-)

Posted: Tue - January 27, 2004 at 02:31 PM          


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