As the Web Burns, Life, Technologically Impaired, internet »

Some questions have been raised about the downside of having a hosted blog verses going with the free server blogs.

The best reason I can think of for not having a free hosted blog, was the great BlogSpot outage in 2001. No one could publish to their Blogspot hosted blogs. If you had FTP you could publish through that, but it left me in the dark as to when I could update my blog. This happened the first week I got really into blogging. Then came the fall of Diary-x and the Journal Script. Anyone remember that? It just sort of faded away, but I knew people who were still using Diary-x up until it crashed and burned four years ago. All entries were permanently lost. People who had been blogging since 2001 lost everything after five years. Diary-X was a pre-greymatter program that allowed its Journal Script to be installed on a domain. You had to make the templates from hand, but that was ok. Many times I had a different template each day. But when Diary-X went under, all that was left were the sites that had Journal Script installed on them. Source. As long as I have my domain, my entries are safe, unless I delete them.

As a writer, I treasure my entries, no matter where they are. Every year I back up my journal, just in case something happens to it. It’s the only outsourced journal that I have and I don’t trust the company who hosts it, so I back up. I back up my hosted blogs too. More closer to the time that my payment is due, because you never know when I won’t be able to pay for my site any longer.

Another reason I pay for a site rather than getting a wordpress-hosted blog or blog spot: The simplicity of making my own pages and hosting them here, where I know I won’t get the rug pulled out from under me, is quite comforting. Josh has never removed my content before, and I don’t think he’s going to start.

One of the better reasons is I can ban people. Yep, if you fuck with me enough, I can add your IP range to my .htaccess file and not have to worry about you, until you start dicking around with proxies, and then you’ve circumvented the ban and I can file an official report with your ISP.

Then there’s email. I can go 5 years without logging into my email address here, and I don’t have to worry about someone getting a hold of it an re-registering in and then breaking into my stuff. And should someone attempt to log into my stuff on this site, their IP is logged and I can file complaints with their ISP. This usually ensures a rush to complain to Josh that I’m abusing his server because I caught them trying to break the law, but whatever. I’ve never had any content removed from the web, ever, so I guess I know where the line is and I walk it very finely.

Next Entry: A Second Pile of Entrecard Ghost Droppings