blog.kennypearce.net

Outages and Such

"For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher,
He had but little gold within his coffer;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he'd pray right busily for the souls
Of those who gave him wherewithal for schools.
Of study took he utmost care and heed.
Not one word spoke he more than was his need;
And that was said in fullest reverence
And short and quick and full of high good sense.
Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech;
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."
- Geoffrey Chaucer, describing me - I mean the Oxford Cleric - in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

So here's the thing: You may have noticed that there have been a lot of outages on this site lately. This has to do with being behind a firewall and on Verizon DSL. My current setup for this site has a lot of problems. This port forwarding thing is ugly (that's the silly numbers after the : in the URL), and it turns out that my DNS record is technically invalid (but it works anyway). What I really need is to actually pay for hosting. The cheapest hosting that will do what I need costs around $8/month, which will bring the cost of running this site, including the domain name, up to just over $100/year. The problem is that "I have but little gold within my coffer; / But all that I might borrow from a friend / On books and learning I would quickly spend." So I know there are at least a handful of people who actually look at this site regularly, and I know there are a lot more who find it on google (I get hits from several hundred unique IPs each month), and my question for you is, if I asked for donations to pay for real hosting, would it be worth it to you? Do you think it's worth paying money to have this site up and running all the time rather than going down all the time? If you have an oppinion or suggestion, please either leave a comment on this entry or contact me by some other means. $100/year is definitely not very much money divided several ways. Thank you.