A Geek Goes Flying

Well, my ArkaHosting VPS instance finally actually went offline ( expected ). I have all the data online at home, but need a publicly accessible version for beta testing (don’t want to open that network to the world). Where to move to? Google seems to be indecisive  (and has a history of growing bored with offerings and dropping them, chronicled at Killed by Google and elsewhere). Azure is Microsoft, and while this might be the new and improved Microsoft, I tend not to trust them. (Can’t imagine why .) There’s AWS, but, that’s, you know, Amazon  (as also seen in Unfulfilled ). (Still on my personal boycott after they - for the umpteenth time - flaked on “guaranteed same day delivery” for stuff I really needed to tend to my dying dog.) Seeing what’s out there. For context, I was paying the (evidentially unsustainable) amount of $36.50/year, including a $1.50 upcharge for a 1 Gb/s link upgrade from the standard 100 Mb/s connection, for a “ 6GB VPS ” with the following specs: 4

Sigh. Just saw this email, after seeing an  article on Slashdot . I have a VPS instance with ArkaHosting. Fortunately, the (massive) database is a slave copy of a MariaDB instance I host on my redundant NAS at home, but still... From:  ArkaHosting <support@arkahosting.com> Date:  December 6, 2019 at 16:18:33 PST Subject:   To Our Customers - Important Information  Dear Customer, Over the past few months we have been met with many challenges within the hosting business. Some that have not been overcome. As result of this we will be closing our doors.  We will be shutting down this Monday 12/9/2019.  We are taking this time to let our customers know so that they may backup and retrieve all of their data before then. We deeply apologize for this inconvenience. Thank You. Management --- ArkaHosting Staff support@arkahosting.com - Available 24x7 For You! https://www.arkahosting.com visit our website   |  log in to your account   |  get support Copyri