For the very few people who do keep up with my site here there may be some downtime over the next few days. I’m moving everything to a remote host for quite a few very good reasons:

1. With the plan to finally physically move house this year, moving electronically out of the house early ensures I don’t even have to think or worry about what my next broadband connection will and will not allow, to say nothing of the likely gap in service during the move.
2. Reduces my phone/internet expenses by 2/3rds.
3. Reduced electrical costs from keeping my servers fired up 24/365.
4. Less environmental noise from fewer boxes running. (The “servers” are even the noisiest so this is kind of a big deal)
5. Less hardware maintenance. The “server” boxes I use are basically all of my older retired machines and many of the parts are way past their MTBF.
6. My current DNS management sucks through Visi. They have been a really good ISP, but I should not have to send email to support to get a DNS change made when I feel like tinkering with things.
7. Kind of tired of re-learning bits of Linux every six months after I have forgotten most of it in the interim when I’m not having to mess with the systems. Though I am seriously moving my non-gaming machine to Ubuntu to give it a serious try.

I’m sure there are a couple of more that I’m not remembering at the moment but as you can see the list is pretty extensive and while in a lot of ways I’m going to miss doing all of my own hosting of everything the advantages are just too many at this point.