You get what you pay for

My apologies for the fairly frequent downtime on the website. For the most part my hosting company - Site5, does a pretty good job. But of late, they can't seem to keep MySQL up. So when you get those nasty looking MySQL errors, it's nothing but the shared database engine crashing and burning.

At this point, I can't really justify moving to a dedicated facility for what would be roughly 10x the price. As much as I think my rantings are "important," 70% or so of you read this through asynchronous methods like RSS or email - so the website being down isn't the end of the world.

Some day when I have a big commerce engine running 24/7, then my decision will be different. But for now I'll just deal with the fact that I pay $8/month for hosting and that means there will be some hair on the site.

Gets back to that risk/reward decision that we all have to make on a daily basis.