I can have my own virtual machine, lowest specs, for abut the same price as dreamhost each month. And since it is my own box I can do whatever I like with it.

If this site got more hits, and I had to increase the specs, dreamhost would be cheaper, but no one comes here so rackspace will work super.

More importantly this lets me setup a vpn server outside of Australia. While I find it very unlikely that I will ever go to a site banned by the government’s filtering scheme, my protest is to simply bypass it.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

The move will happen over the next few weeks as I find time to install wordpress on debian and get it configured and hardened. The DNS will be staying on dreamhost, so I doubt any changes will be noticed.

What does all this mean? Well iDisk is basically a webdav folder on apple’s site with some preconfigured settings, directories, some nice integration into some of the apps, and isync support. If you can do without the isync support, thanks to the apple finder, you can mount a webdav folder on a web server as a network disk, and use it almost the same way you would your iDisk.

So I have an “iDisk” I can use almost exactly the same way, but it also supports ftp, sftp and rsync.

I won’t include instructions for setting up webdav, it entirely depends on your webhost/server, but once it is setup, you can easily connect to your new disk by selecting “Connect to Server” from the “Go” menu while in finder, or simply hitting “⌘K”

If you enter the URL of you webdav location correctly you will be prompted for a username and password and the webdav location will be mounted as a disk. Welcome to your almost iDisk

And a side note, register for the trial, because you get to keep your .mac ID and using iChat will still work.

With .mac, for $139 AU I get 10 gig of storage, email, webhosting and other stuff I can’t remember right now and didn’t really interest me. With dreamhost for $99 US I get 500Gb of online storage, 200 emails, webhosting and my own domain name. And domain squatters are some of the most evil, simple minded, people you can find on the internet. It took me 4 weeks to think up this domain, and it wasn’t the best I could do, I thought up some freaking awesome town names that were all gone, not to proper sites, but to directory lists and squatters. !@##$ing squatters.

Dreamhost also have awesome technical support, and an excellent control panel with one-click installs. Seriously, I installed wordpress in less than 2 minutes. And dreamhost are not paying me to write all this. I am open to that, but I am pretty sure they are not.

So the integration between osx and .mac is pretty cool, but I can’t think of any other reason to fork over the money.

I even went thirds with a couple of mates on this host, (that’s why I don’t control the front page,) so for about 3 bucks a month I host here. And I have found workarounds to the integration issues that matter to me.

Until .mac is free, dreamhost whips the dotmacs pants.