So I and a bunch of other people just found out that our long reliable web host, SpiritOne.com up and disappeared in the middle of the night around Oct 1, 2017 along with our pages and email services. Or maybe one of the two remaining tech guys quit, and the other one died after accidentally locking himself inside the server closet, and his bloated carcass finally exploded and took down the servers. Or maybe the techs are fine but just really really (like 9 days really) negligent about recovering from an obvious catastrophic failure. In any case, their services seem to be mostly gone.
Reading recent comments on Yelp it seems like a lot of people like me who just got techno-ghosted started with SpiritOne or Aracnet as a DSL provider back when that was the best option. Some folks had been with them for 20 years.
We were with SpiritOne since we moved to Portland in 2006 and needed DSL service. We had DSL (1.5 Mbps!! -- which was good enough at that time to stream Netflix; the web is getting worse in some ways) until the phone company (QWest, now CenturyLink) seemed to be screwing with us. The modem had its own web based control panel that showed among other things the connection speed to the DSL provider. It would sometimes show the connection at about 56 kbps. Rebooting the modem allowed the full 1.5 Mbps connection to be established, but that speed would sometimes just last a few minutes before the connection dropped back to dial-up speeds. The SpiritOne technicians, who seemed very good, claimed that it was the carrier, QWest, that was at fault, and from other dealings with QWest, I believe that was true.
Anyway, when it became clear that crap DSL service was the new normal and that SpiritOne was powerless to do anything about it, we switched to Comcast cable based internet, which despite all the complaining that people do about Comcast, I found and still find to be good. Not world-class good; my rural-dwelling Canadian cousins have something like 80 Mbps + phone + digital tv for the same thing I pay for just 20 Mbps + phone. But for broadband in the United States, good.
But I kept my old personal web page with SpiritOne because it worked well, they allowed server side php scripting and in my fantasy world I would have the time to do all kinds of hobby programming to make something really cool.
Because it was available I even bought my own name as a domain and pointed it at my old web page ... and since that is no longer there, I have created this temporary page using very very little script (very plain, but it loads so fast!) and my registrar's 10 MB of free hosting space to serve as my home page until I can do something with it.
Most likely (!) a very long time from now.
-Scott
2024-12-28 04:45:18