Sixty years ago I put up the first fractalus web site.
Well, obviously not sixty years ago. It was actually just six, less one month, but sometimes it certainly seems like sixty. And as far as the net is concerned, it might as well be sixty, because the web has changed in that time, from the new growing thing to the booming thing to the has-been-and-will-be-again. The long, detailed history of this site is of interest to no one but me; were I to tell it, you could rightly accuse me of being as long-winded and dull as Tolkien.
I never really planned to have a big site when I first started, with a trivial little GeoCities site in May 1997. Things just turned out that way. My own content soon exceeded the limits of GeoCities’ hosting, so I moved to my own domain, and once there, I had more options for hosting others’ content. From there, and word of mouth, and from running a contest or two, I have watched the traffic on the site increase steadily. And while that’s very gratifying, it’s certainly not without its drawbacks.
A Box of Its Own
Running your own server just so you can have a web site is sort of like assembling your own car so you can drive to work; there are people with the know-how, but even they really don’t do it just to get around. It’s an act of lunacy, because if anything goes wrong—and sometimes things go very wrong—there is no one else to turn to, no one to scream and yell at and insist that it be taken care of immediately. There’s just you.
Just how wrong things can go is pretty scary. When a hard drive dies, I’m the one who gets to find a replacement, drive to the hosting facility, put the new drive in, and—if it was the system boot drive—re-install the operating system and reconfigure it to work again. Sometimes that happens at inconvenient times, like a few days before I’m set to leave for New York. And sometimes you discover your system for backing up data was insufficient, and data is gone. Poof.
The biggest expense in hosting a busy site is usually bandwidth. Providing my own server gets me off the hook as far as storage goes; but as the popularity of the site increases, more and more data is downloaded from the server, and that is a very real cost. Most of the time, it’s a known cost; demand rarely spikes beyond predictable levels. Every once in a while, though, the unexpected happens and things get to be a problem. The usual culprit: somehow a link to a site on your server gets posted on LockerGnome or Slashdot, popular sites where hundreds of thousands of visitors will come streaming in in just a few minutes. Most web servers aren’t built to handle that kind of load, and buckle under the stress; even if the web server continues to function, it’s likely to run out of capacity in its data pipe with so many requests. Only sites for whom a hundred thousand visitors is normal will accept this kind of punishment without problem, and those are run by people who have more resources than I.
The Plus Side
With all this trouble—keeping the server running, finding hosts willing to handle the traffic without charging an arm and a leg, and still paying as much as a car payment just to run a site—you may wonder why I still do it. Sometimes I wonder myself.
What it really boils down to is that I want to run my site my way. If I want to change database servers, I can do that. If I want to set up a new mailing list, I can do that. If I want to host a few extra sites, I can do that. It’s up to me; I own the hardware and I pay for the connection. I don’t have to answer to anyone for the content or the decisions.
Such freedom costs plenty. Not just money, but also time and stress. Freedom has never been free. In this case, it’s absolutely worth it.
Here’s to another sixty years.
