For the past six years, I have offered several of my friends free web hosting via my own personal web hosting accounts, under the prwdot.org domain name. I have set up and configured Movable Type blogs, Gallery installations, kept the software up to date, helped troubleshoot issues, mitigated the occasional security threat, and paid for the web hosting (which included storage space and bandwidth) that these folks used.

However, over the past few years, with the growth of our family, I’ve had less and less time to devote to running and supporting free web hosting. Though I enjoyed the opportunity to serve my friends, I found that I just wasn’t able to provide the same level of quality service that I once did. So, I’ve recently made the decision to end the free web hosting service, which will hopefully give me a few less things to think about.

In thanks to these friends for hosting with me, I’ve set up gone.prwdot.org, a domain to which their old websites will continue to redirect, and which contains links to all of their known sites, social networking profiles, or other pages. Thanks Will, Amy, Josh, Nathan, Jon, and Corey.

As a side note, this will also help out our family budget, as I’ve moved us from a slice at Slicehost to an account at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Though I still will recommend Slicehost for folks who need a beefy, dedicated-virtual server with great support, we’re moving to NFSN because of their pay-as-you-go, bill-by-the-penny model. Web hosting will cost us around $5/month, possibly less, as we’re billed on a daily basis for exactly how much storage and bandwidth we use on that given day. I may write about NFSN in depth at a later time, but suffice to say for now I love their pricing and philosophy. While they aren’t the cheapest if you’re hosting large files or doing a lot of traffic, they are certainly very reliable, responsive, knowledgeable, and fair, and they have a business philosophy that I admire.