blog@maumae.net

This whole effort of getting our own web site started some time ago when I realized that we were paying a fortune for mac.com. I guess one account would be okay -I'm spending the same, about $100/year, for www.maumae.net- but we had to have 2 accounts (one for me and one for Céline, as AFAIK, mac.com can not support multiple email addresses per account. After all, it's the philosophy behind how it's called, no? My account name is frigaut@mac.com, and that's an address, hu? Anyway, so we had to have 2 accounts. That ended up being too expensive, so I though about moving to an independent host. Here are the pros and cons of doing that, one mac.com vs one independent host:

• Pros:
  1. I'm getting my own domain
  2. I can create 1000 email accounts, for me and my family
  3. I have, not 100MB, but 800MB of disk space
  4. I have, at long last, access to a cgi directory where I can run cgi and perl scripts for dynamic web pages. This means, of course, that I can run stuff like a proper weblog.
  5. I have -almost- full control over this site, with administrator privileges. Of course, I would have even more extensive control if I were to run the server on my own machine, but I am fully satisfied with what lunarpages provides. Beside, it would be much more work to set up my own server and keep it secure, without mentionning the hassle of having a connection and a server 100% uptime, and the cost of that with my link provider (roadrunner).
• Cons:
  1. I lost the ability and great interplay between my web site and many of my apps:
     1. iPhoto to produce quickly wonderful looking web pages for my pictures. I have been able in a few hours to replace this by Minigal, a php script that produce similar results, and that is more configurable, so no loss here.
     2. iSync: This will be lost forever when my mac.com account goes down (October). And because I have 2 macs (a powerbook and a G5), this was useful. But this is not such a huge deal, as iSync only synchronizes safari bookmarks, address list and calendars. I can easily write a small script, or even do the sync by hand. But it will require more attention in the future.
     3. iChat: I will not have the mac.com address I use right now for iChat, but I can (can I?) get a AIM address. Or does it require a AIM paying account?
  2. I loose the iDisk, mounted transparently as a webdav share. I'll have to live with this. But I can almost as easily ftp into my webserver. Not as trannsparent but faster. I usually do most of my stuff in the command line anyway, but one can use a GUI interface if needed (by the way, I discovered and installed ncftp, which is neat and much more powerful that the standard ftp: for instance you can transfer directories recursively).

For me, pros 2 and 4 did the trick. No more restrictions on email accounts and access to cgi-bin. I've been really happy with the switch and had a lot of fun setting up my own webserver. Now the above list shows that it is not a win-win situation. one gains some, and one looses some. In the end, it all depends what's more important for you.