Hosting Decision
I've had a couple people ask me about my logic in deciding to move this site. I guess I can provide a little more insight into what I was thinking. The best way to do this is probably with pros and cons for each option.
First, we should consider where I was running before, a rented server from esecuredata.
Pros:
- Complete control - I mean complete control. I could log in and do anything I wanted on this server. I could install anything and run anything. This is why I got this server in the first place for hosting the price tracker.
- Reasonable price for a dedicated server
- Minimal interference from the "hosting" company
Cons:
- Paying for a full server when hosting a low-traffic blog
- All migrations had to be handled by me
- No redundancy when there was a scheduled outage
- Backups had to be manual or self-scripted
- Upgrading the OS costs money
Clearly, there are cons for my use case that were mostly financial. If the host had been free (or considerably cheaper), I probably would have sucked it up and continued to pay.
The next option I considered was a static blog generator. There are literally dozens out there. They provide a piece of software you run on your computer. You manage the blog on your computer and publish it to a hosting system. I was considering doing this with some sort of cloud-based storage.
Pros:
- Seemingly simple - see cons
- Cheap
Cons:
- Not actually simple - It turns out that most of these static blog generators are commandline tools. The one GUI-based tool that I found (thingamablog) was not very good.
- Apex domain issues - Using cloud-based storage is great for www.webgadgets.ws, but I typically don't have an IP address for webgadgets.ws. I would need to find a service that would redirect to www.webgadgets.ws or I would have to have a host somewhere providing that functionality or proxying the site. Considering I always publicize this site as webgadgets.ws, this is a pretty major issue.
- Limited editability - I would not really be able to edit my blog from anywhere. I could use source control to save the raw files, but I'd still have to make sure the software is installed everywhere I wanted to edit.
Finally, we get to something familiar with Wordpress.
Pros:
- Popular
- Full-featured
- Free
- Apex domain mapping
Cons:
- Lost SEO - Pebble (my former blog software) provided permalinks in the form of "/<something made from the post title>". Wordpress does something like "/<year>/<month>/<something made from the post title>". This is clearly incompatible.
- Lost control of subdomains - Wordpress needs to be your name server if you map an existing domain to it. Therefore, I wouldn't be able to create and maintain foo.webgadgets.ws if I wanted to.
The last one on the list is Posterous.
Pros:
- Free
- Complete DNS control
- Apex domain mapping
- SEO preserved
Cons:
- No support for StatCounter - StatCounter is my analytics and traffic monitoring system. I like it better than Google Analytics because it is simpler and more direct. Unfortunately, I cannot use it to its full capability because I cannot put JavaScript in my site template.
- No ad support - I did manage to get an Amazon ad on here (as you can see), but that's in an iframe with no javascript needed on my site to render it. Of course, with the traffic I get on this site, I don't really need ad support anyhow. It doesn't do anything for me.
There you have it. That basically covers my decision. I did also toy around with other pieces of software running on cheaper (virtual) hardware. Nothing really beats 80% of what you want for free, though.
