My Web host had really been pissing me off lately.

• Bandwidth overage charges, even though when I signed up I was promised "unlimited bandwidth"¹
• Increasingly frequent downtime
• Problems sending or receiving mail
• A refusal to address their wide-open SMTP port, resulting in lots of spam being sent with a "shipbrook.com" address (and the inevitable deluge of bounce messages and complaints coming back to me
• Decreasingly competent technical support
• Refusal to update software to recent versions, so that new functionality could be leveraged²
• Failure to transfer billing over to my new account information
• A billing department that never answered the phone so I could get the previous issue corrected

So, this month I built myself a server from the ground up, configured it the way I wanted it, and shipped it off to a friend of mine from high school, who now (among other things) runs an ISP. He's letting me hang the whole box off his pipe for less than the cost of my shared (and nearly crippled) hosting account at the abovementioned Web host. True unlimited bandwidth, as many sites as I can eat (or want to pay for registering the names of), and since it's my box, complete and total control.

I figured it was going to be a horrible challenge to set up... but it was really pretty easy. The hardest part was getting the database copied over, since (thanks to the blogs and the On Notice Generator) it was too big for phpMyAdmin to export all in one shot.

But everything's up and running, and the bounced-spam messages have gone away. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop...

1. It turns out that means that they won't block your site from serving pages if you exceed a certain bandwidth limit (which they never specified in the contract!), they'll just charge you for it.

2. Arrgh, I've succumbed to office-speak!