It feels weird, looking back and realising I’ve been paying for an itty-bitty slice of the web for the past decade. I’ve gone through a couple of providers over the years and I’m still using most of them.

My first hosting account was one of those £10 a year jobbies that came with 5 MySQL databases and a whopping 250 MB of space. This was obviously after the normal GeoCities, .tk domain years but they don’t count. I lasted a good few years on this, running homebrew PHP with more holes than swiss cheese and relying on whatever the control panel of the day was.

It took a while before I finally jumped to Dreamhost, at an astronomical (for a non-working student) price of $120/yr. They might be bad now, but they were pretty terrible back then. The only redeeming feature was the zealous overselling. All of a sudden I could have unlimited domains, databases, bandwidth and accounts. Needless to say by the time I started sharing out my account, the monetary difference wasn’t much.

Dreamhost was where I also first used SSH. This was some terrifying, mythical stuff. Generating keys, passing them around, running a daemon and then quitting my session so it died. I managed to get Django up and running after a solid weekend of poking at a box, and that was the best feeling in the world.

Five years ago last week I signed up to Linode. $20/mo, but I had my own “box” (a VPS is about as close as I could come to getting an entire box without forking out for my own server). This was barebones. No nice GUIs or pre-installed apps. I had to SSH in. I had to install Apache and set it up and fix it when I broke something. I learnt more stumbling around in the dark than three years of Uni taught me about computers.

And then the new kid on the block. Digital Ocean. $5/mo. Madness! Pay by the hour as well, so I could try something for a few hours and kill it. 30c, cheaper than a pack of crisps. They’ve grown now. The early Amsterdam servers had so much network contention it was awful, but since then I haven’t had any trouble. By making something so cheap, it’s removed the worry of just trying stuff.

An honorable mention alongside all this goes to Vagrant and VirtualBox. Being able to spin up a server locally to screw with makes local dev a lot easier. Coupled with Ansible, those days of tweaking and installing are long gone.

I’m still using Dreamhost (hey, free storage) and Linode (my main site, this site) and Digital Ocean (all of Bulk Buffer). The price parity between the last two means I might try and consolidate them down now. But I’m lazy and moving stuff is hard. Outside of my own FQDNs, there’s EC2 (never enjoyed), Rackspace (nice performance), GCE (yet to try for anything serious) and Azure (mighty interesting). For the personal stuff, the idea of an ephemeral server kinda doesn’t work.

So if you get a DNS timeout this weekend, I’m probably switching something somewhere.