This morning, I started to think about dog years and blog years.
The conventional wisdom is that every year of a dog's life is approximately equivalent to seven years of a human life. Some folks consider a dog's first year, which comprises infancy and adolescence, equivalent to a human's first 18 years, and then multiply by seven for every year thereafter.
This led me to speculate about blog years. My blog was down for three days this week because it had exceeded its allotment of bandwidth - as you can see, it is now up again. This has been happening about every six or eight weeks, and I've been speculating about how this affects the continuity and readership of my blog.
My current hypothesis is that one terrestrial day is roughly equivalent to one blog year.
My blog is built on BlogWare, and hosted by Netidentity, both of which are owned by Tucows. I'm beginning to think I've outgrown my current configuation, and am looking for advice and suggestions. Tip of the hat to Peter Campbell, who has already sent me some detailed and very helpful thoughts about whether BlogWare is the right choice for me!
The standard Netidentity/BlogWare package is $69.00 a year, which includes 2 GB in transfer bandwidth. Every time that my blog is suspended because I've exceeded that, the good folks at Netidentity move it up a notch at no charge. This happens about every six weeks, and the limit now stands at 5.8 GB. That's very generous (no extra charge!), but it isn't enough for the traffic I usually get.
Netware has now offered me a deal of 10 GB in bandwidth for an additional $80.00 year, and I've accepted it.
Meanwhile, Peter strongly recommends that I switch to Dotable, which is his current host. This is not only because he's concerned about my hosting arrangement, but because he's worried that I'm too beholden to BlogWare's proprietary arrangements.
Always, grateful for an endorsement from a satisfied nonprofit techie, I had an IM chat with Aussie Bob over at Dotable. He says that they offer a much better package at a lower price, and I swear that he actually said "no worries!" a couple of times. However, he also said that I should make sure that BlogWare is built on PHP/MySQL if I want to choose Dotable as a host. This brings me back to Peter's worries about BlogWare as a platform.
Um. I'm having a hard time finding out, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't built on PHP/MySQL, since searches of the BlogWare knowledge base using these as keywords turn up no links whatsoever to either.
Now, it happens that I quite like BlogWare, Netidentity, and Tucows - I would never seriously consider migrating elsewhere if it weren't for these bandwidth problems.
But these questions linger:
1) Is there another highly reliable BlogWare host that can offer me more bandwidth at a lower price?
2) Should I move to another platform, and (if so) is there a terrific platform with a wizard that makes it easy to migrate everything from BlogWare?
3) On what platform is BlogWare actually built?
4) Is the any merit whatsoever to the concept of a "blog year?"
For detailed reflections by Peter Campbell that have been posted publicly, please see this thread on the Information Systems Forum.
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