I’ve been fiddling around with website development for about seven years now, and I’ve picked up a few skills along the way. For instance, in a situation where a sane person would call tech support and try to explain their problem to a condescending man in some HQ, I prefer to stick it out and spend however long it takes to solve a problem myself. Foolish in some cases, but extremely helpful in learning the tricks of the trade.

There are some battles, however, that simply cannot be won.

I spent a good six hours today (my first day back from Governor’s School, at that) designing and implementing a new website for Charlottesville High School’s Theatre Department. I’ve been putting off installing a content management system on that thing for months now, and if I don’t do it, there’s no way the site will get updated once I’ve left for college. You may remember I tried to do this very thing two months ago, but hit a brick wall when I learned that Charlottesville City Schools don’t support MySQL. So this time, I decided to just host the MySQL database on my own server, while keeping the actual pages on the schools’ (CCS has some sort of obsession with keeping all their pages hosted locally…). So there I was, for a good six hours, creating banners and modifying templates, chmod-ing and remapping directories, when I realize that the server simply can’t handle WordPress; it’s useless for me to try.

Thus, in my signature rash act of fingers on the keyboard, I decided to completely ignore the CCS Webmaster’s requirement that all sites be hosted locally. I went out, registered a domain, and realized that I could save myself hours and hours of trouble just by hosting the site myself. WordPress will work, my scripts will work - it’s a winning situation.

The way I see it, kids had to host class webpages themselves in the 90s when their school’s didn’t have websites (a.k.a. didn’t have the resources to handle the website the student has created). I see myself in a similar situation. The Charlottesville City Schools are unable to handle the website I want to give to the CHS Theatre Community, so I’m taking things into my own hands. Forget regulations, forget the Webmaster. This is my website, and I’m going to create it the way I want.

Out of curiosity, where are you hosting it? I recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net , because it would only cost you about 2 cents per day. (I’m paying more like 3 or 4 cents a day because I have a couple of posts on my blog that get a fair amount of traffic.)

I have a dreamhost account for all my websites. Yes, yes, it’s overkill, and I could find much cheaper hosting, but I’m loyal to them. Plus, they’ve got some really nice features I wasn’t able to find anywhere else.

And at the same time, I don’t tend to view $8/month as expensive - I remember when you’d pay $20/month for 100MB of disk space.