Just recently, I switched from my the interminably irritating and downright inadequate 2MHost to the comparatively angelic Bloghosts. I was more than a little self-congratulatory on the matter.

Scant days after the DNS changeover, Bloghosts displayed the following message:

All servers will be monitored and remain online until January 1, 2005. At this time each server will be shut down. Henceforth orders for new service will not be accepted and current customers will not have their credit cards charged for these final two months. We regret this decision but after putting our best resources to work it has become obvious that the damage caused by the corruption is irreversible.

Calamity. Uproar.

I spent a few weeks on the Bloghosts servers, alternating between stumbling around in a pit of hopeless, bleak despair, musing about the moral nature of the universe, and playing scrabble against a team of augmented furbies. I considered hosting all of my sites in my closet on a Radius 81/110 that is rarely used, but this plan was thwarted once I realized that I’d need to do something tricky to get it on my network (and thus to the Internet). I have an AAUI-to-RJ45 Ethernet transceiver, but such adaptors cannot, apparently, communicate with 10/100BaseT equipment, which constitutes my entire home network.

One day, exploring BugMeNot’s site for some reason or another, I noticed their “hosted by” link to NearlyFreeSpeech.net (“Not free. Close enough.”). I was immediately floored. Hold on tight, squint your eyes, or put your shoes on. Do what you need to do to brace yourself, because these are their rates, in U.S. dollars:

Bandwidth: $1/GB
Storage: 1¢/MB/month

Don’t pick yourself off the floor yet, because they also don’t place any limits on the number of sites that may be linked to one debit account or the number of domain aliases that may point to any one site. They have stellar — nearly instantaneous, in all my experience — support, and seem to have real dedication to their service.

On a darker note, I’ve had no luck whatsoever in requesting a refund from Bloghosts, which they seem to generously offer on their site. Jace does not seem to be responding to any email. I may be out the $30.

In summary, we here at the pygmysoftware.com domain have a new home, and it is glorious. Have a good day and do not worry.