April 4, 2025
Newsonaut comes home
Newsonaut has moved to a new hosting service and domain registrar. Normally, that wouldn’t be very exciting news, but it is for me — because the site has come home to beautiful British Columbia.
I’ve been using hosting services since the days of dial-up, and my fascination with the idea of making something that could be shared with the world.
My first hosts were actually ISPs that threw in some free web space for their clients. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen any more.
I was lured to a real host by TextDrive. It was unbelievably cheap and offered support for Textpattern, a free and open source CMS that I continue to use to this day.
The pricing was indeed too good to be true, and TextDrive went out of business. You can still visit a memorial site.
Forced to move on, I landed at InMotion Hosting, mainly because they at least appeared to promise to help with the move. That never happened. I just copied everything over and hoped for the best. Luckily, it worked out and I stuck with them for a couple of decades.
For my domain registrar, I went with GoDaddy. I can think of no other reason than that I fell for their marketing. I’m glad to have left because I can’t shake the feeling they were ripping me off one way or another.
Now, both my domain registration and web hosting are with StormWeb, a company based in Victoria, B.C., that has been around since 1998. Their servers are in Vancouver.
StormWeb actually did help me move. In fact, they did everything for me. I had to go out that evening, and by the time I got back, they were done.
They’ve been quite responsive to my questions, which are answered by people who know what they’re talking about.
It feels good to be home.