Rouge Amoeba has a post up with some pretty solid advice on things to consider with a web host. This whole topic was spurred by the scheduled power outage at Dreamhost.com that went terribly wrong.

• Experiences In Web Hosting

I found this particularly interesting since I was one of the many people who got caught up in Dreamhost’s outage. This site was down for what seemed like the better part of Saturday and Sunday. I was still seeing some intermittent flakiness Sunday night and Monday morning with the mysql server.

A look at the comments on Dreamhost’s status blog shows that there are a lot of really pissed off people about this.

• Power Outage Update
• Residual network issues still

I does really suck to have your site down for a prolonged period of time. That said, I’m not really very pissed off about this. I pay about $8 a month for the service. I get everything I could want to play with. They are very responsive and fast with the changes and updates. Also, I get almost unlimited bandwidth. I don’t really see much to complain about here.

If I was hosting a commercial site where I was relying on income from the actual website, I would be panicked. Then again, if I was running a commercial site, I probably wouldn’t be hosting it with Dreamhost. In web hosting, reliability is what costs the big bucks.

I finally took the plunge and actually bought me some web hosting. My lonely domain name (nerdstargamer.com) will finally have a home with DreamHost. As a result of the transfer, you won’t be able to get here by typing in the www.nerdstargamer.com address.

Now I suppose this is pointless, because if that’s the address you had, you wouldn’t be at this page now. Oh well. My blog will still be up as normal at http://nerdstargamer.blogspot.com/. Hopefully within the next week my domain transfer will go through and I’ll be back up and running.

Behind the scenes I’ll be working on transferring this here blog over to WordPress. Exciting stuff. I can barely stay in my rolly chair.