For the last week or so Critters has been down.
I was surprised to see that Andrew Burt, who runs Critters, runs the site on on his own servers.
I run about 50 websites (some only one page, some 200,000 pages), but I use shared hosting. I spend less than $15 a month on hosting, but I make many times that back. It is true that I am down two or three days a year, but the sites always come back within a few hours of a phone call.
Andrew Burt list his network, his UPS and a server all at once. He was away from home and could not get at the site to fix it. All that equipment as well as internet access has to cost a fortune and require lots of maintenance. I know that working on hardware like that can be fun, but for about $180 a year he could have someone else do it for him.
It makes absolutely no sense to run a server from your basement. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to try it.