stormdog | (no subject)

I am playing with the idea of finally decommisioning the servers at my house and moving my mail and http servers to a hosting service. I'd miss the pleasant humming of fans going 24/7, but I no longer do so much with the hardware that I really need to be able to get my hands directly on it, and I might even save money on hosting costs vs. electricity. Plus I don't have to worry about hardware failures or anything. Yeah, I get a thrill out of running all of my services on my own hardware, but not enough of a thrill to justify doing it if it makes more sense to have it hosted somewhere.

I've never looked into anything like that. What's out there that I would be able to have a static address for to assoicate stormdog.fdns.net with and that I could run Apache and Mercury Mail on? Any suggestions? I really don't know anything about paid hosting. Posi, I don't know how your host works exactly, but it sounds like maybe I should consider them? My needs are pretty low-volume right now, though maybe that will change if I ever put together a photography website.

I'd no longer be able to manage and run my own NT domain at my house, but is there really that much of a point to that? It's kind of fun I suppose, but it doesn't really do me any good and I hardly ever do any tinkering with it. On the other hand, if I decommision my servers at home, I won't have a central machine to use as file storage and sharing for the rest of the house. Decisions, decisions. I probably don't really *need* a file server. I could just replace that functionality with an external hard drive and the Linksys NAS adapter box that