I've used Cubesoft Communications as a web/email host for nearly five years now. For the most part, it's been pretty good up until now.

Unfortunatly, it's taken a turn for the worse. To prevent them from having to reboot the server every few months due to Linux kernel vulnerabilities, they went ahead and switched to OpenBSD. The switch has been nothing but trouble. I'm not sure if it's the admins, the OS, or some other factor. But the box is down several times a week now. The problem seems to be processes going awry -- usually either mysql or php runs away with all the resources, causing the box to either crash, or at least prevents everything else from working. Obviously, that's not acceptable. And to make it worse, OpenBSD doesn't support SMP, so they had to move from a dual 2Ghz machine to a uni-processor 3ghz. It's much slower.

I'm now on the hunt for a new place to host OpenThought.net and OpenThought.org. I'm willing to use up a favor on this one :-)

I want to have a decently performing place where I can make OpenThought available, providing a wiki, possibly CVS access, and other goodies. I also would like to put all my pictures online. And of course, this would be my primary email site. Oh yeah, and it has to support mod_rewrite.

To do this, my first choice is to colocate a box somewhere. Free is best, but I'm willing to pay a little bit for it... particularly if it means I don't have to worry about inadvertantly saturating someone's line. But if it costs too much, and I might as well just buy business class cable and host from my house. It also might work out to go in with someone on such a venture, but we'll see how pricing goes.

It recently hit me that upon setting up the email/web server for the local Linux and Perl groups, I never added a backup MX record to the DNS entry. Which would be a problem this weekend due to scheduled downtime of the datacenter it's being hosted in.

Andy was kind enough to offer their Querx.com server (what in the world is a Querx?) for backup email.

I just went to setup the secondary MX, and realized I never bothered to add *any* MX record. Apparently, email can still get delivered without any MX records listed. Every person on the CPLUG and HPM mailing list has been doing it for three months :-)