scottw

It is b.s., but the good news is that you can often get a credit annually for whatever percentage they're down from their SLA (I don't know if RS does this).

Before you buy from a web host, check their SLA and ask how they cover SLA breaches. Don't do business with a company that won't put their money where their claims are.

I used to work for iServer (later bought by Verio; in full-disclosure, I'm now a contractor for Verio). I remember one time the city had shifted their output by 90° (or something like that...this was years ago).

Our datacenter UPS was tied right into the 3-phase output and didn't recognize that the power was still flowing from the city. The diesel engines fired up and started powering the datacenter (redundantly). When the gas ran out a few hours later, everything started shutting down. It was terrible. Hundreds of servers with 600-800+ days uptime all went down and stayed down for hours. We were shuttling people from the office down to the datacenter to fsck and bring machines back up. It was a long night and long next week issuing credits to customers who had lost data.

Today I've got servers with Verio, Bluehost, and LayeredTech. They've all been great for the most part, but none of them have been near perfect. I know that most hosting companies I've worked for or dealt with put uptime near the top of their list of priorities because they know it's an easily measured number people bank on. I'm sure RS will get their act together and be as solid as they've typically been in the past.

I'm a long-time blosxom user. I can't stand not having plain-text files for my entries (via Emacs). I use Markdown and Smartypants for HTML styling. The plugin architecture is still unrivaled in blog software, imo. I've used three or four of the hundreds of plugins and written 8 or 9 of my own (specific to my needs). Still loving it.

... and mean people suck!

I'm similar; I have a day job that I do 7-4ish (usually 6-7 solid hours of "work", occasionally 8-9) and then 1-2 hours consulting and 2+ hours on my bootstrapping startup. About 10-12 hours total work.

If you do decide to give it to someone, you can use a dead man switch (http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is a good example, or write your own) that would email all your account information to someone you trust completely. You could give them instructions (destroy the account, give certain information to next of kin, etc.).

I have a little bash script I use on OS X:

screencapture -x screen.png && scp screen.png myserver:www

"Are you ready for some hard core rejection?"

lol. That and some hard core misinformation apparently (at least according to a few of the VCs we've talked to).

We'll keep at it; where does one shop for good VCs who would look at someone in our situation?

We appreciate all the feedback; thanks!

I didn't even know such a thing existed...thanks for the tip!

You can see several sample games in the youtube videos on that page.

Because it's a social game (i.e., you can't play alone), registering is more of a quality control than anything, like news.ycombinator, for example. Registration is extremely minimal (email address only required).