So this week I went into a burger joint to get some lunch and ran into a dude who I knew from my undergrad days. Let’s call him Stephen because that’s his name. In the very early days of this website, he was my system administrator. He operated the actual server that my web site was hosted on. This beat up old Linux box contained all my web pages and my e-mail. This thing went down more often than Superman at a men’s truck stop bathroom. I don’t know what that means. Anyways, my web site and e-mail were frequently unavailable. I`d have to call Stephen to get the server rebooted. It was frustrating because it would take sometimes days for it to be fixed. One day, I realized that no amount of free web hosting was worth this, so I started paying for web hosting at another company. Since then, this site has had an uptime of about 99.9%.
I haven’t seen Stephen in a while but we joked about the good old days. He’s still working for an IT company and he even offered to host my site again, at $200 a month. I pay about $70 for hosting so I had to turn him down. I don`t need a dedicated server like he was offering.
Those were the good old days of free and unreliable hosting.