Executive summary:
I am about to shut off wsmith.best.vwh.net. Please fix links if you have any.
Long-winded nostalgic ramble:
More than ten years ago, I signed up for my first web hosting account. I went with a local ISP called Best Internet Communications, which occupied a retail storefront in Mountain View, California. I imagine that at the time there were very few other places in the world where it would make sense to open a retail storefront selling TCP/IP connectivity.
I picked Best because it was very geek-friendly and they provided BSD Unix shell access as part of their hosting plan. It was very handy to be able to telnet to shell.best.com and get a “second opinion” about whatever weirdness I was seeing from my desktop machine. (Even after they moved us all to shellx, an SGI machine running Irix. Weird Unix, but four processors, cool!)
The company was tiny, and it was easy to communicate with the people who actually got stuff done. Maybe too easy…I remember a lot of flaming between customers and employees on the internal usenet groups.
Anyway, when Internet access started to appeal to more than just geeks, Best hit the big time. They merged with Hiway, then were acquired by Verio. My (pathetic) website moved from http://www.best.com/~wsmith to http://wsmith.best.vwh.net. The geek-friendly nature was replaced with Giant Faceless Corporation. I kept paying my monthly fee because I’m incredibly lazy, even as the going rate for hosting dropped to about a tenth of what Verio is charging.
I’m happy to report that Google has finally noticed my redirect to this new, spiffier, readably-named site, so it’s finally time to cancel my Best–I mean Verio–account. If you have old links to my site, please fix them up.
You can take a virtual tour of the fabulous Best facilities courtesy of Matt Dillon.
For the geek-friendly ISP of today, try Speakeasy.
