Updates and Down-lows

The past few weeks have been interesting, to say the least. When Bud died, I switched into a mental "survival" mode and just kind-of took care of business. That meant that certain things, like this blog and Friday Favorites, have had to slide for a little bit. Things are starting to return to the routine and I have started to devote time to some of the less urgent activities I enjoy.

One thing I was able to do late last week was to move my web sites to a managed host. I had been running them from a server in my house and that started to cause two very distinct problems once their popularity increased. We're on the basic DSL through our provider which only gives 1 meg download and 128K upload (pretty sluggish as broadband goes). This caused the sites to load slowly for visitors and sucked our "outgoing" bandwidth down to nothing if we were trying to surf while someone was accessing the site.

I had two choices if I wanted to keep the sites running. Upgrade our DSL (4 meg up/384K down) or go with a managed hosting service. Upgrading the DSL is $10/month. managed hosting is $7.95/month. It was an easy decision.

I did some checking and decided to sign up with MidPhase. They offered the best bang for the buck for what I needed, which was mostly lots of disk space. They also have no setup fee and free domain registration as long as you have service with them (a lot of providers charge an extra $10/year for domain registration). So, unclebubby.com was reborn.

If you're looking for a web host, I would encourage you to shop around. MidPhase may not suit your needs but you should look them over to see if they do.

That's about the only major thing that's been happening lately. Work is about the same but it hasn't been bothering me as much - I've had more important things to concern myself with. I have heard rumors that some changes are on the way. We'll just have to wait and see but it appeared that some ground work for change was completed on Friday.