One of the last remaining impediments to moving over to cable broadband was removed recently when my wife allowed me to move my domain hosting to her account via Dreamhost. Now we no longer have a need for the server at home which means we can move to a faster Internet service provider.

Not sure if I've whined about our DSL service here or not. We have Qwest DSL for the network connection. Our ISP is another provider, US Internet. I've had USI since ... boy, maybe since 1997 or so. I started with them as a dial-up user and switched to DSL when it finally became available in our area back in 2002. When we first signed up with DSL, the fastest speed Qwest was offering was 640 Kbps (up and down). Eventually, when Qwest started offering faster speeds, we moved to their faster service offering.

Then we moved. Our current house now sits too far (in terms of wiring distance) from the nearest CO (or wiring hub) to get anything faster 256 Kbps. And, there's no way in Hell Qwest will address this problem unless I could somehow prove that there's a major wiring issue outside of our house. And, now that our city's planned WiFi project is effectively dead, we have no other option except cable broadband.

I think things would be a lot different if we'd just moved from 56 Kbps dial-up to 256. It would have seemed like an improvement. Instead, we moved DOWN from 1.5 Mbps to 256 Kbps. Talk about going back to the Internet "Stone Age".

We were married to the DSL service because our ISP gave us two beautiful things at no extra charge, a static IP address and a policy of NOT doing any port blocking. This meant we could run an Internet server from home and not pay hosting fees to anyone else. This was fine when we were at a faster DSL speed, but it turned out to be a headache at the slower speed combined with a dramatic increase in readership of Shelly's blog.

Well, Shelly eventually moved to Dreamhost for hosting. Now that I've moved mine, we can move to faster service.

Yay!