Let me know if I missed anything, or missed some section in anything!

Hey folks, sometime recently, our FTP server stopped working. It was bound to happen eventually, but I suspect our hosting provider simply turned us off. We were doing 50GB a day of FTP traffic on a virtual private server, and I think that’s the definition of a “bad neighbor”.

We toyed briefly with an account at uploadingit.com, who advertises 100GB per day of transfer (probably enough most days), and to their credit, they even privately offered us an increase for the days we publish the show so long as our average stayed under 100GB. Unfortunately, they’ve been fraught with downtime lately, and as we were uploading the show to them, they went down. Right after I posted that the Kruf episode (116) was working again.

We considered cloud storage from a few different vendors (Amazon, and the likes) but with our monthly 1.5TB of FTP traffic, it’d have been way too expensive. We also considered Libsyn and Podbean and other types of unlimited bandwidth podcasting hosts, however they charge by the amount of shows you have available at one time, and we wanted to keep the whole show downloadable. Also, their pricing structure seems to reflect that they do most of the legwork involved in setting up a new podcast, but we don’t need any of that. We only needed someone to serve our files.

Anyways, I remembered that the space upgrade at wordpress.com was in fact considerably cheaper than a lot of the other hosting options out there, and while they had had flakey downtime and latency issues two years ago when we used them, I’d heard good things about them since. Long story short, we’re going to be using the wordpress.com hosting service from now on. If you ever have issues playing the podcast, please get in touch with Euri by email.

The interesting thing about this, to me, is how little of it I was aware of — other than we needed a new hosting solution, most of this is news to me, and fascinating news at that. It really underscores in my mind how amazingly little I do to help the podcast. Euripides, Darkbrew, and Alisaunder do all of the work. I just show up on Saturdays — I don’t even read the HPP email or the show doc in advance.

Don’t get me wrong, I do spend lots of time researching and testing all the hunter stuff out there, so I think I bring a lot of useful information to the show, but I do feel guilty from time to time for not actually helping with the nuts & bolts of running the show. Maybe I should try to find someone who wants to give something away on the show, and consider free stuff for listeners my contribution.

On the other hand, that sounds like it would take time, which I do not have.

This is not actually an interview with Ghostcrawler. I did not ask him any of these questions, and he did not answer with any of these answers.

But in a deeper sense, a more spiritual sense, Ghostcrawler and I are two lost souls reaching for each other across the vastness of the information superhighway, each seeking that other half to fill the emptiness within us. We are platonic life partners bound by the love of the hunter experience.

Because of this connection we share, this ephemeral bond, I am able to predict how he’d answer if we did in fact conduct an interview. If I happened to sit at a bar next to Ghostcrawler in the not-too-distant future and our eyes met over a glass of stout in a moment of magic, I think we can agree that everything in the following transcript is exactly as he would say it. The only thing that might possibly be different is the words. … Read More.