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Himeji Castle

Tectonic Shifts

For the last couple of years, I've hosted Hamfisted.net with www.pair.com, an excellent American hosting service. I've been on their Webmaster plan, which is a tad pricey (US$30/month) but really has been rock solid. It's a bit of a power user plan, with 200GB/month transfer, 3GB disk space, MySQL / PHP, Webmail, SSH and tonnes of other useful techy stuff that I put to good use, although as I've shifted my picture galleries across to Flickr and redesigned the site, my requirements for bandwidth and storage have dropped dramatically. It's reassuring to know that I have the proven technical capability to post and serve high-quality videos of my ass at any time, though.

There's one problem with my hosting at pair.com and unfortunately it's associated with the speed of light, which is probably not something they can fix. My site is hosted in Pittsburgh, which is a very long way from Sydney. This makes it somewhat slow, even before factoring the embarrassingly bad state of Australian internetworking. When I was living in Vancouver and London, Pittsburgh was relatively close, and the network between my desk and my site was much faster, shinier and less fattening. Using and working on the site was quick and simple, and I didn't really think much of it. Here in Sydney, I really feel like I'm out in some backwater, connected to the real digital world with two tin cans and a bit of string.

The obvious solution is to host my site in Australia, but the big downside to that plan is that while everything will be faster for me and my endless legions (heh) of Oceanic readers, the site will suddenly be a lot slower for... well, everyone else. Do I care about this? Well, I don't really want to make any change that decreases performance for my audience, but I have a feeling that very few will notice, and fewer still will care. Power users to my site read it maybe once a day, and it's a fairly remote chance that they'd say something like "Ye gods! Hamfisted.net now loads in five seconds rather than one, so I vow to leave and never return!"

I've got until the end of the month to make up my mind, as that's when pair.com hosting expires. I might end up staying with them, or switching to a local hosting provider, but it's unlikely I'll switch to a different American company. Pair have just been too good. If you can recommend a decent Australian hosting company that does PHP/MySQL hosting for about $30/month, drop me a line... but be warned I will probably ask you about a bunch of techy stuff you've never heard of.