New Website Launched

My old website is a perfect example of the costs of "Technical Debt". I am an IT consultant, I do websites for a living, yet for my personal blog up until recently I took the cheap & easy route. My site was hosted with Webhost4life because they were cheap, I was using an out of the box blog engine(SubText) because it was easy, it was only a matter of time before cheap & easy caught up with me. I noticed a few weeks ago my site was down...sort of.

• One domain name pointed to a site with a server error(no recent code changes)
• The other domain name was pointing to a working but out of date copy of my website

It seems they screwed up a prior server migration the last time my site crashed unexectedly, promising me that the new servers were reliable. I called tech support to get my site back up and was told the platform I was on was old and no longer supported, the only resolution they offered was to migrate...yet again...to new servers and this time hope it was done right.

Ultimately I decided that even if the new migration worked I was still unhappy.

• I was tired of fighting the HTML web editor to make it do what I wanted
• I wanted to add custom applications
• Even if the migration worked correctly this time, I was hosting with an unreliable host

In the end I decided if it is worth doing, I should practice what I preech and do my own website the way I would do it for a customer if they were paying me. I hired a graphic designer to come up with a look and feel and started developing a new site. I wanted a good hosting provider that supported .Net 4.x and MVC2 so I opted to go with Discount ASP. It was not cheap or easy nor is the site done but at least now I am proud of my site.