I just cancelled my DSL service. Not sure how I feel about that, as I’ve had the service for almost 8 years. It was a “geek friendly” package, which meant I paid a premium for a couple of static IPs and the privilege of being left alone to run whatever services I wanted. But the service over the years became more and more “slow”, relatively speaking (ADSL, so 1.5/768), and with the advent of so-called “cloud computing” it didn’t seem like such a great deal anymore. So I started moved my hosting to Rackspace, and as I’ve just completed the transition, it was time.

For all but the last few years, it was a great service, and I’m going to miss the aspects of it that gave me the warm fuzzies of knowing everything was (literally!) in-house. The last few years, however, in addition to the growing feeling that I wasn’t getting my money’s worth any more, the service started to go downhill a bit. For the last few months I’d been having an intermittent issue with connectivity, affecting voice and network traffic (which, despite decent support, they never did solve, big negative), and that, and a couple of other minor issues, all came to a head when the move became real.

So in the end, I think I’ll be just fine using commodity residential internet (he says before he has to re-experience the wonders that are the cable companies…*shudder*) and cloud computing services, but I’m going to miss pointing at a rack in my house and being able to say “my website runs there”.