i'm sure it's obvious to all of you who have been using editthispage.com for your weblogs that, of all the free web-based services out there (for site-hosting, e-mail, drive space, etc.) it is by far the least obtrusive of the bunch. you don't have to deal with ads, pop-up windows, required 3rd party logos, scrolling commercial marquees and all that other crap. (even the This Is A Manila Site icon on default weblog themes can be easily and safely removed.)

BUT...! (isn't there always one, where freebies are concerned? ::snicker::) ... and this is a big butt of a "but" ...

as many of you have also noticed lately, editthispage.com either slows up quite a bit, or simply doesn't show up -- probably the server crashed, or is being rebooted at the time you tried to access your weblog (and if you're unlucky enough, like Kass a couple nights ago, to flip your weblog just as the server is rebooting, you'll lose that day's link).

anyway, the reason for these problems is not so mysterious: as more people have found out about this free weblogging service, they've applied for accounts. i'm not sure how many working weblogs ( as opposed to deadlogs like Spark's old one, haha) editthispage is hosting, but it's in the thousands now. as you might imagine, a few thousand regularly updated weblogs puts a significant strain on a server machine, or even a server farm. and we're talking 'normal' weblogging behavior here, as contrasted with the meta-tag hacking behavior that one of us who will remain nameless -- but whose initials are, uh EB ;-) -- accomplished in AIC last summer.

of course, we can hardly complain about slowdowns or being caught in the middle of the occasional reboot... after all, the service costs us exactly $0.00, right? right.

a few weeks into June, as this weblogging community finally picked up steam and i had utterly hooked some key individuals into it (::chuckle::), it did occur to me that, nice as it is to have a free weblog-hosting service, i felt a little unsettled by the thought that our life stories, as they unfolded onto the Internet landscape would be residing in a serverspace beyond our control. the "what-ifs" were reasonable: what if editthispage.com somehow went out of business? less dreadfully, what if, at some point in the future, they actually charge users a ridiculously large fee to continue using the service? either way, we end up frozen out of the service and, potentially, out of the historical record of your weblogging (i.e., an important part of your online lives).

tomorrow: getting our own Manila weblog server!
[benefits: fast! convenient! more features! personal, instantaneous access to the sysadmin! (me, hehe.)]

{ net.casting }
^