I admit it, I am a conspicuous consumer who reflexively buys the latest tech, but I still like to read Consumer Reports and Affiliate Confessions. I really appreciate this guy's pound-it-out style of making a living from the internet. And while his lifestyle is so very different than mine, I think we share the same desire to learn from mistakes and the willingness to share them with others.

I've also been enjoying reading his ongoing series of posts about Build a Niche Ebay Store. Building and running a niche/thin site is not something that fits in our business model, but it there are a lot of things about it that are very interesting to us from the standpoint of business strategy and what we call "small idea" software development.

When Bad Things Happen To Good Sites

Apparently the Niche Store guys got hacked and their website went down. Oops. And it's still down. And up. And down. Dang.

I can relate to the frustration they must be feeling right now.

I wrote earlier about our Cari.net issues - and they're still not really resolved - there are corrupted DNS entries out there that are preventing regular readers from getting to our sites. (Note: FeedBurner is still working fine, which is very interesting.)

And while we hate to lose readers, that is an order of magnitude less painful than losing buying customers during a product launch.

The Downside of Outsourcing Hosting?

Well, it's the downside of hosting, no matter who is doing it, you or some hiking boot clad short wearing dude in a data center. It would be nice to have a contingency plan full of backup servers at different data centers, but I'm not sure it's worth it for small business units. It's not like your local brick-and-mortar organic grocery has a contingency plan for an ice storm. Other than to make sure they have insurance and a financial buffer to replace the spoiled Brussels sprouts.