Man, that Argentine spam entry was prophetic. (Caution, geek entry ahead.)

Until yesterday, this site was "hosted" by a free server. Sorta.

The story: The blogging program I'm using, GreyMatter, suddenly broke for no apparent reason back on the 22nd. I loaded a fresh, virgin copy to another directory, triple-checking all the paths and CHMODs. The test copy also didn't work. (This particular server allowed PERL programs to run from any directory... in theory. In practice, it seems that PERL programs were allowed to run from no directories.)

I put in a request for the server's folks to make sure that everything was kosher on their end, knowing that it wasn't. They responded within a couple hours, saying that they rebooted the server and the problem should be cleared up. It was. It was deceptively encouraging.

In the meantime, I'd taken the opportunity to re-investigate Blogger - which was having troubles of its own the first time I looked into it, which is why I decided to use GreyMatter... which I thought it would be more reliable, being on the server that hosts my site and all. Huh.

Anyway, things were fixed, and the next day I was uploading a post when things busted again. Put in another help ticket to have them reboot the server... and still haven't heard back. It's been a week.

I gave Blogger yet another look during the second, extended downtime, and thought about using their BlogSpot for hosting: building a frames-based site under the domain name hosted at the free server. But the more time that went by, the more pissed off I got at the free server. (Geez, it was free... what did I expect?) So I did some research, and am now trying out a discount hosting service. We'll see how it goes.

The free server: DuploWeb
The new server: Feature Price "Mini Plan"