First impressions...

Ok, here's what happened. Dreamhost, a large hosting company, recently had problems with several of their web servers. As a result, many websites went down. It turns out Dreamhost had actually lost data and did not make backups. But the worse part is, they never emailed out an announcement to affected users (not because of mail problems- I received several emails, but only as replies to conversations I initiated).

Someone had commented that no one in their right mind would host a high performance website on a cheap Dreamhost account- that if you need more speed, buy the Porsche instead of the Corolla. I agree. But speed was not the issue in this case. Here, a common part in the engines was found to be defective, and users of both Corolla and Porsche deserved to be notified.

In my case, I was just trying to use Dreamhost to move a blog that my wife keeps, a photo gallery, and personal email accounts off of free services in an attempt to take ownership of our personal content.

Imagine, that within a few weeks of this new experiment, everything is gone. I guess any loss of data is my fault. Dreamhost provides a backup user that I meant to learn more about, but I did not set it up within the few weeks before everything broke.

After having thought about it more, the thing I'm really sad about is that my wife's first impression of "taking control of your own content" is that it requires you to learn a lot of new things, is a hassle to maintain, and ultimately fails.