Hostdead

James Duncan Davidson had the right idea about blogging tools:

“I’ve putzed around way to[o] much with weblogging software over the years. It’s been fun and rewarding. But it’s taken away my concentration from other things I should be doing.”

That was in late 2004.

Today I set up a Virtual Private Server with Slicehost with the intention of moving this domain to it, as well as laying down foundation for some upcoming projects. My logic was that having a VPS would allow me to run whatever crazy-ass blog software or services I so chose.

Halfway into the tedium of setting up my server I surveyed the world of hosted blogging for the first time in ages. TypePad still sucks. Blogger sucks harder, if that’s even possible. But WordPress.com does not suck, and just today they added support for custom domains. This serendipity got me thinking.

My email is now totally outsourced. Wouldn’t it be nice to do the same for blogging and the minimal file hosting needs I have for my domain? No upgrades, no patches, just write when I feel like writing. Always on and someone else’s problem. Yeah. Yeah.

So I get all my entries imported into a WordPress.com blog. I get the design looking halfway decent. And that’s when I find out that WordPress.com currently doesn’t allow for both hosting a blog and receiving email at the same domain name. This seems to defeat the purpose of such an offering entirely. Bah.

It’s really surprising that there’s not a mature hosted blogging offering in 2006. Like, shocking. What am I not getting?