Bravenet, with their usual reasonably good intentions and yet complete lack of thought, launched their new, self-run hosting last Wednesday/Thursday. It's priced pretty nicely so I signed up for the executive option (the top package) for some nice fat bandwidth and a full domain name of my own. Then the lack of thought reared its ugly head. No where in their advertising did they happen to mention the other, vital, restriction on the very generous 500mb of space you are given. 1000 files. If you run a website, go and select 1000 files worth of site and see how little space this actually consumes. Great isn't it. My site is currently 920 files large, roughly. That gives me a mere 80 files with which to consume another 450mb of space. Good thinking.

The other major flaw is in the emailing system. They offer you something like 30 e-mail addresses with your hosting. Setting them up is a piece of cake, just fill in three or four text boxes and there you have it. However, there are no incoming or (if they have it) outgoing mail server details. So you can create a mailbox e-mail address but you can't actually use it. You can, technically, set an e-mail address that you create to forward on to another address. It can also send a reply to the person trying to contact you, to let them know that their mail has been forwarded. This doesn't work. At all. After a day, I still await an e-mail I sent myself. After a couple of hours, another guy still waits for his mail to tell him that his test message is on its way to me.

It's a good package (with more options promised soon) but dear lord, why couldn't they wait until they had it all properly set up. I can only pray that they listen to my e-mail recommendation to increase the file number limit, at least to 2000. When the teething problems are sorted, The Word should hopefully be on the move. Until then it's staying here. Bah.

Written to Howard Shore - The Ring Goes South