since I host a wordpress site or two, it’s off to a new hosting provider.

I miss them – I’ve been working with ’em for ages. (Just about the beginning, I think)

Via rydia.net –

Rydia.net is a niche webhosting service that operated from 1999 through 2015.

As of this writing, we are no longer accepting new accounts.

Current users: we are not shutting down, going offline, or losing your data. We will be slowly ramping down service. We will be in touch about transferring ownership of your domain if it is under our account. We will also be in touch about transferring you to another service. Remaining users are welcome to stay with us for longer under some circumstances.

We will no longer be accepting payments for service as of March 1st, 2016. If you need more time, please contact us. You can stay for free until your situation is worked out.

It’s been fun, and “officially” closing this is incredibly hard. While the site has looked like a ghost town for years, I’ve been maintaining the service and answering support questions. Over the last five years the need for our kind of webhosting has declined, with cloud and hosted pagemaking services making it free or very cheap to host a custom portfolio online. We weren’t large enough early enough to be a sustainable business and Rydia has remained a side project for 16 years.

We started on a single small recycled desktop computer in a closet at an ISP, the machine slower than the original iPhone. Every year or two we moved datacenters, onto better and newer (and usually still donated aside from the harddrives) hardware. We always pushed to get the best deal so everyone could use all the bandwidth they needed for a price that wouldn’t bankrupt me. I spent extra efforts whenever someone got their 15 minutes of fame, with traffic crushing the system. We never shut someone off or charged them above their monthly fee for the privilege of having a good traffic day.

I want to give my most sincere thanks to everyone who has hosted with us over the years. It’s been amazing watching people grow into careers, mature their art, or even decide to find something new. Rydia was instrumental as a learning tool for myself early in my career. I learned a lot about systems administration, about maintaing uptime, backups, customer support, etc. While there are some regrets about not investing enough time into it early on, I’ve gotten a lot out of it and am honored to have met all of you.