Over the years I have used a number of hosts for my web pages. I mentioned that I used the Pitt Unix System initially. However, I soon realized that my climbing report postings were personal, not job related. So I found a free host, Crosswinds.net, and posted my climbing page there. It was good for a while, but at some point my site directory disappeared. It got reinstated, but I realized I needed a more reliable host. (Crosswinds.net is no longer free, though they have a very reasonable paid site. I have not tried it).

When I retired I moved everything to a hosting service provided by my first ISP, DirecTV. They went out of the DSL service business about the end of 2003, and everything was transferred to Verizon.net. The url provided by verizon was long and cumbersome -- no mnemonic value at all. So I moved much of my site (especially my climbing pages) to different, easily referenced free hosts -- Bravepages, Crosswinds.net, and Angeltowns. Each of these was great when I signed on, but became less suitable (or no longer free) as time went on. I also used Yahoo's geocities.com for experimental pages and for temporary pages, like my annual Holiday Greetings.

Verizon, meanwhile, made some changes. One is I can use a more mnemonic url (philip.sidel instead of vze1sg5c). Verizon has farmed the web hosting to an outside company, and no longer has adequate support (I can't find information on how to edit the site, and verizon support simply says they don't provide that kind of support). However, at this point (October 2005) the ftp access works in very standard ways, and that is fine for me. The space available on my Verizon Site is limited, so I may soon be moving some of my pages to another free or low-cost site.

Click here to read about my experiences with generating the code to build my website.

Click here to read about my experiences with various Graphics Tools.

--- Phil Sidel