Fiat Lux

As I walked in the door from school tonight, my phone rang. One of my classmates was calling; another classmate had been hit by a car (not fatally, thank god), and did I know the name of her boyfriend so the boyfriend could be called?

I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend, and I feel really lousy about that right now. We’re in two classes together and even in a working group for one of the classes; you’d think I’d have learned something as basic as her relationship status halfway into the semester. What kind of self-involved person does that make me?

The other thing that really makes me feel bad is I drove right by the accident scene tonight, and I didn’t know it was her. As I drove past campus heading home, I noticed that there was a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police car all clustered round a car in the street, plus a lot of students standing around. But I didn’t stop to ask what had happened. I just wanted to get home after a long day.

I really wish now that I had stopped.

Bleh.

This morning I got an e-mail reminder that I need to pay for another 12 months of web hosting at Powweb. In other words, I need to get off my butt and get serious about what I want to do with the site and my hosting.

I wrote this summer about the difficulties I had with Powweb’s support team after their site migration broke a key script on my website. At the time, I decided not to move, since I was paid-up until October and didn’t want to waste my money by leaving sooner. That’s a classic case of using a sunk cost for decision making, which is one of those thing you’re really not supposed to do, but I did it anyway.

So the way I see it, I have three choices.

First off, I could call it a day and shutter Fiat Lux. There’s a part of me that’s thinking, “Why bother? You’re not blogging as much as you used to, your posts are getting more banal, and your readership is off — do you really need to be doing this whole website thing at all?” In which case, I would take the site down, get an email-only hosting plan somewhere (probably Tucows, since that’s where I have the domain registered), and that would be that.

Next choice, status quo. Although I’m definitely not blogging like I was six months ago, I don’t particularly want to ditch this blog altogether. And although I’m still somewhat irked at Powweb’s recent crappy service, I really don’t have all that much to complain about when you look at the total scope of the last three years of hosting with them. Especially when you factor in how little the cost is. So perhaps I should suck it up, pay for the next year of service, and continue on as is.

The third path would be to find a new web host. If I did that, I’d probably want to take advantage of the switch to make some other changes to the blog — like a new template, or an upgrade to MovableType 3.x or maybe even give WordPress a try. After three years, Fiat Lux is overdue for a redesign. However, the problem there is the timing. October is a very busy month for me; I have a product launch at work and accounting midterm next week, plus various other stuff for school going on as well. Also, I really ought to be spending my free time on starting up the post-graduation job hunt, not playing with my personal website.

So, there you have it. Three options. All have pluses and minuses. And I have just 18 days to decide before I have to either put down some cash or shut down the site. Less than that if I go with option three, because I’d have to allocate time for coding and testing before throwing the switch to the new site.

The only option that’s not on the table is moving to one of the free blogging services. Why? Two reasons. One, because I’ll still have to pay to have my domain e-mail hosted somewhere, so if I decide to keep blogging, I might as well get a full web hosting plan and run my own site. Two, because I can. I’m not much of a geek compared to most of the folks here in Silicon Valley, but I am just enough of one that I’d rather run my own website than use someone else’s service.

Oh, and bonus reason three: because as someone whose career has a technology / marketing focus, I find it helpful to stay hands-on with at least some aspects of Internet technology. One of the gripes you hear about marketing people in the tech world is that they can be clueless and unrealistic when it comes to their expectations of technology. Being clued-in to even the basics helps stave that off.

I don’t get as many visitors as I used to, but those of you who still stop by here, what do you think? Have you faced a similar choice, and if so, what did you choose?