Recently, I’ve been moving several of the things I originally thought I’d do myself onto hosted services. Why? Well, for one, it’s easier to have someone else guarantee uptime, especially for mail.

Services I do myself (Warning: Lots of links; I’m not a linkwhore, really)

• Website – A Linode running Ubuntu Edgy Server and lighttpd + PHP5 Fastcgi
• Blog – WordPress + MySQL 5
• SCM – Subversion, although I’m tempted to start moving things to Bazaar, I’ve heard it’s fancy
• Backups – rsync + ssh, what else?
• Outgoing mail via… I haven’t decided yet (nbSMTP looks fancy) (see below)

Services other people do

• Photos – Flickr: They’re really awesome, even though they got acquired by Yahoo! who’s trying their best to make their site dumber. They’ve got some really cool Web 2.0ish features like automatic blog posting, RSS feeds, and other cleverness
• Mail – Google Domain Apps: I originally used Hula for this and hosted it myself, but it became un-upgradeable and after Novell’s announcement to terminate the project, I needed a replacement. It also used a ton of memory and leaked it like a sieve, so that didn’t help either (I actually needed a cron job to restart it every night). Google Apps does the trick, and it lets you have domain aliases, so local.paulbetts.org isn’t broken
• Website Stats – Google Analytics: There’s no way I could get the kind of info I can find out using Analytics; it’s easy to use and is free and awesome; every site should use it
• RSS – Feedburner: I just discovered this one (or rather, just discovered how to write the redirect to it). Looks like it gives some good information on who reads your RSS feeds, as well as adding some handy links; I played with their Flickr integration too but I decided against it because it obscured the blog posts. The only thing I’m worried about is that broken RSS readers won’t handle the HTTP redirect correctly and get confused, but we’ll see.

Update: Problem solved, Google saves the day yet again