If you've ever been to my profile page, and why would you, you would see I proudly display my "Hosted by Rydia.net" emblem.
Well what does that mean?
Rydia.net was a webhosting service a friend of mine started back in 1999. Once services were actually commercialized, it was $5/mo for hosting with 40MB of space and SSI, $10 if you wanted a subdomain with 50MB of space and CGI, or $20 for an actual domain and 100MB of space. I'm sure the space restrictions got way looser over the years, but even at launch there were daily back-ups being performed (in a pre-cloud era) which was probably a factor in the space concerns at the time. Shell access and SQL capabilities were pretty rare and high-value services at the turn of the century, and they were also on offer as add-ons.
For my part specifically, I benefited from the admin knowing I was a broke teenager and just giving me hosting for free. Eventually my use would balloon to 127MB and he was nice enough to turn CGI on for me in 2002 when I wanted to have a rotation of signatures show up on my SomethingAwful forums posts
The service mostly hosted artists, and it was the first place I'd ever seen an oekaki board. I never drew anything on it, because I don't draw and a lot of these other people very much did and that made me self-conscious, but it was a really cool thing to see in... 2001? Pretty ahead of the curve, for the Western web.
Another reason Rydia.net was special to me—and this is again entirely about the human admin rather than the technical underpinnings—was that after hosting my dumb shit for free starting in February of 2000, and with the last file I updated having a modified date in 2008, he reached out to me directly in April 2015 letting me know the hosting server was coming down soon, and asking me to tell him when I was done pulling a tarball and it was safe to nuke my folder.
Beyond the material use I got out of the hosting itself over a decade, the most valuable thing to someone like me with awful brain-memory and a retentive archivist spirit was that outreach ensuring I could keep all the detritus that AT ONE POINT was the most important thing in the world to me. Sure a lot of it is trash, but a lot of it is also stuff that doesn't exist anywhere else at this point. Like the first pictures I ever saw of the woman I've been with for over 20 years, or friends from high school (including the header image on my profile here,) or art my friends from IRC drew of me.
and that's worth more than $1,200 in free hosting, or whatever it would have cost as the pricing model evolved over the course of that 15 years.
