Last year Chuq moved his blog from self-hosted Movable Type to Typepad. I’ve obviously been an avid early adopter of Typepad but over the years I’ve hosted my own Web sites, source control systems, and such. Even though I find system administration to be one of the most unsatisfying parts of the software development exercise, I usually start with hosting new stuff on a beaten-up server running on a DSL line out of my house.
But when the price is right, my impulse is always to hand the system administration chores off to someone else, although I always do so with some hesitation — I always worry that the hosting provider won’t deliver what they’re supposed to, or that I won’t be able to get answers to questions when something goes wrong, etc. When Mark Fletcher (late of Bloglines) gave a talk at Startup School back in April and said that if he had it to do over again, he’d outsource server hosting instead of doing it himself, it made a big impact on me. There’s no shame in handing off some piece of the puzzle to someone who’s making a core competency (and, more importantly, a business) out of what you are trying to do.
So over the last year or so I stopped hosting a bunch of the web sites I hosted at home, moved my self-hosted Subversion instance to a $10/month hosted service, moved my DNS hosting to a dedicated DNS hosting provider, and taken one of the two web servers I’ve been hosting at home out of service completely.
It’s interesting that an IT stud like Chuq shut down his own MT installation in favor of the hosted service. I suspect this is a matter of "life’s too short" for him although he’s certainly got the chops to keep hosting his blog himself if he wanted to (he architected the system and leads the team that manages most of Apple’s voluminous email communications).
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