Basically www.FinchHaven.com started in about 1996 on halcyon.com/~jsage/ (although it wasn't called FinchHaven.com, then) and has been growing (with little-to-no prior planning) ever since.
I registered all the finchhaven.* variants (*.com, *.org, *.net) in 1998.
I've had to change web hosting companies several times because they were cheap and went out of business, once literally in the middle of the night with no prior notice; that time I woke up to find that I had no web site and no email.
So since April of 2004 I've been hosted at Pair.com.
They are not inexpensive, but I've learned the hard way that cheap is cheap for a reason.
Pair.com has excellent customer support the few times I've needed it, and is bullet-proof and rock-steady in terms of uptime.
Last summer I began to work on the one serious downside to Pair.com: being a very prolific photographer, I tend to shoot a lot of events, and take a lot of photographs when I do.
Combine that with the fact that I've never taken anything down that I've put up and I was just about to max-out my current disk space allocation for the hosting plan I had.
The next hosting plan with more disk space was way more money: way more than I could possibly justify spending.
So my brilliant genius son-in-law Bryan suggested that I look into Amazon Web Services, particularly Simple Storage Service, or AWS S3.
"Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers."
Right at the start of last summer I signed up for AWS S3, did a little perl hacking on the user interface aws (also written in perl) from Tim Kay, and now have a series of perl scripts that let me list, put, and delete objects in my "buckets" -- as AWS S3 likes to call them.
This means that from last June onward all my images are stored out in the cloud on Amazon Web Service's S3, while all the html for my web pages is stored on Pair.com.
And this means that I don't have to worry about disk storage space anymore, at all.
Now I'm working on a serious html overhaul, since some of my web pages had grown to over 210k bytes in size, which is embarrassingly obese by web page standards.
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