Trying to understand the world of hosting, dns, name servers, registrars, cnames, domains etc etc...
Bizareo world it really is, lots of shady reselling going on, companies that tend to vanish over night unintentionally and ones that vanish quite intentionally with your money ; round every corner it seems.
I've been getting a bit pissed off, I just registered a free domain at co.cc to only have co.cc vanish today, no doubt they will be back in a day or so, but to have a name server go down is unacceptable even for a second.
And my web host has given up the ghost too, almost in tandem. All my searches through free hosting has resulted in wasted energy, seems like almost every other host you goto is really owned by one you just visited already, I thought id found a gold mine with 07x.net but didn't take long to find it randomly decides not to serve up images now and then, but I found a few more hosts that offered similar if not as great services... but nay they looked suspiciously identical to 07x.net and I\'m fairly sure they were either the same company or reselling services of the same company, in any case, they both suffered the same fault.
Even looking at paid hosting resulted in frustration, I can put up with limitations and file size limits on free hosting, but even stricter file format and size limitation on PAID hosting is out the question, I got fed up in the end after host after host told me they didn't support anything other than images and html, NO videos, no zip... or their idea of unacceptable use constituted of users downloading more than 1mb per visit.... *cries*
So basically I have to pay £10 a Month minimum to get even basic hosting it seems..... screw that. This site is a hobby/form of expression more than anything else... call me tight. Makes more sense for me to just continue hosting it myself, move it onto my always running Mac Mini.
All made extra difficult by my somewhat specialized needs. I need Large file hosting (20mb) (or at least I will do eventually) a gig of storage at least, PHP support (with support for absolute paths with PHP include) and FTP that supports my methods of synchronization.
But hurrah a light at the end of the tunnel, I've found a home with a good friend who has a dedicated machine somewhere in far reaches of the web. For now It's just hosting the images for me, I'll hopefully get the PHP moved over in a few days and get a domain sorted out... It's perfect as I can have a shell account meaning I can use rsync over ssh to synchronize any changes to my whole website in a few seconds.
I'm also thinking of buying AlexLovett.co.uk
Fairly, boring, unmemorable... but hey.. It's my name! therefore I cannot get bored of it and feel urged to change it every year... *thinks about changing my own name* ..... ..... no!
But even buying a name is more complicated than id first thought, lots of resellers, some will drop you and dissolve your account just from a single complaint email or based on text content filtering.... yuck!
These guys caught my attention in my searches regarding hosting and domains, check them out if your interested in this jazz at all:
Link: www.gandi.net
Link: www.zoneedit.com
http;//www.easyspace.com/
