My hosting company, Dreamhost, is running a signup special–a year’s hosting for $7.77–and there is grumbling on the user discussion boards about the fact they didn’t offer this to current customers. A few days ago I would have been among the grumblers, but then I got caught into a URL forwarding mess (still unresolved as of this moment) which makes the saving of a buck or two seem trivial.
Thus far the inability to reach my website has cost me a/$40-50 in paid-for clickthroughs from Overture and Google where people couldn’t access the link they had clicked on; b/an unknown amount of goodwill, certainly a few hundreds of dollars, from people who’ve clicked on the website since I put it up, came back, and now assume I’m dead or out of business. I’d pay many times $7.77 to undo the problem.
I went with Dreamhost because they got good reviews, were not the cheapest but were cheap, and because the founders went to Harvey Mudd, the place where I used to play video games late into the night when the coop down the hill at Pomona was closed. Though they haven’t been especially helpful, the current issue doesn’t seem to be their fault. (The domain www.otismaxwell.com is at another registrar which seems to have messed up the nameserver instructions and can’t fix it easily).
This reminds me of the early days of fax machines. Suddenly you had to have a fax number, and if the fax number which didn’t even exist last week was down (usually because the machine ran out of paper) it was a business emergency. This is the sort of aggravation that is compounded with one-person businesses because the same amount of person power is involved as for a much bigger company but it’s just you doing the work.
By the way, my backup site is still working: www.otismaxwell.dreamhost.com