I ended up picking JTL Networks for my linux hosting. Now I'm in the middle of making sure that everything is correct in DNS and that the site is configured properly.

The old hosting company (HostOnce) is being a pain about closing down the accounts and allowing me to transfer my 2 other personal domains. But, frankly, their hosting service and my needs have been rapidly diverging for close to 2 years.

As always, getting setup at a new hosting provider involves a bit of trial and error. One thing that I've done is setup a separate FTP account for my blogs so that the blog software cannot write to directories other then the blog folders. (Those sub-accounts also use different passwords then my primary FTP account.)

Since my current web host is giving me the runaround about some firewall issues (I'm no longer able to use FTP PASV mode to publish to my site), I'm evaluating new hosting plans. My criteria are as follows:

$6-$12/mo
1GB of space
25GB of traffic
PostgreSQL support

The last item naturally leads me to look at PostgreSQL hosting providers for North America.

A 2 Web Hosting - Either the "Discount" or the "Small Biz" packages include oodles of disk space for a reasonable price. In addition, the Small Biz account would allow me to combine multiple domains into the same hosting account.

pgHoster - The plan that I would want is $15/mo, which is a pity because I'd love to pay a company that prominently promotes PostgreSQL.

VirtuosoNetSolutions - The basic package is ~$60/yr for 3GB/50GB or the eCommerce 5GB/100GB for ~$110/yr. Both packages allow additional domains to be hosted from the same account.

JTLnet - This looks like a good plan. The Linux '06 promo package is $10/mo for 2GB of space, 24GB of traffic, SFTP transfers.

Moved some files around today, so it's possible that there will be some broken links and such for a bit. I think I've finally settled on a page design, and am mostly pleased with the color scheme. The CSS still needs to be tested out in some older web browsers to see how it holds up under the weight of some real content.

Print CSS is still broken, hopefully I'll get a chance to fix it this week.

I've also checked all of the internal web links using Xenu's link-verification tool. However, some of the pages are merely place holders until I brainstorm content to fill them.

Blogger.com has added a comment system and some other enhancements to their service. I'll only be turning on the commenting system on a selective basis for any site news posts, but all of the posts in the Tech Blog will have comments turned on.

Right now, you'll need to be a member of Blogger.com if you want to leave a comment. (I may change that down the road once I test out to see how well Blogger.com has implemented anti-spammer measures.)

GeekMail will be discontinuing service on April 9, 2004. According to the e-mail, it sounded like an internal business dispute gone wrong.

So now I have to go shopping for a new e-mail provider (since I don't want to host my own SMTP server). The e-mail notice suggests looking at FuseMail as a replacement service. However, FuseMail doesn't support any method of accessing the mail server over a secure/encrypted link (one of the main selling points of GeekMail).

So far so good with using GeekMail as my SMTP mail service, takes a bit of elbow grease to setup but has been good and reliable for the past month or so.

I'm currently hunting around for a good e-mail service. The hosting company here doesn't provide an outbound SMTP server, neither do they provide security for the POP3 traffic. GeekMail looks interesting and is only $40 per year and I would be able to keep using my @tgharold.com domain name.

I've been googling for any complaint threads, and other then them getting blacklisted by SPEWs once (innocent bystander, and SPEWs makes it a point to wreak damage on bystanders), I haven't found any threads.

Links:

Finding the right email provider with IMAP support
Spamotomy (listing of hosting services)