steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

    As of last night, Steffi and I officially ended our move - the part of selling our old house, that is. Due to the move and other things going on in our lives, I have made some major technological changes. One huge one being the shuttering of my own web and email hosting operations. Thus far, I can still say that I am extremely pleased with the ease at which I was able to move everything over to Pair.com. I was also happy to see that none of the power outages that the east coast and parts of the midwest are experiencing (see NYTimes articles like Blackout Stretches Into Second Hot Night) have effected Pair's services. When I think of the sheer amount of money I will be saving by not doing the hosting myself, I get all giddy inside ;) While I would still love to pursue helping people set up websites and host them, this is certainly a better and more economic way of doing so. I just haven't figured out what I am going to do with 4 server-class workstations!
    The other technological test I have been running is the usage of an internet-to-phone service provided by Vonage. In one word, the service is fantastic. You wouldn't know that you are on an IP phone connected to some phone gateway elsewhere in the world. The price is awesome, the quality of the phone calls are awesome and the fact that it just works is exciting. Why did I decide to go this route for our main phone line? Cell phones don't work the greatest in our new house and we still have the issue that there is no "unlimited service" cell plan offered by Sprint PCS (or any of the other local carriers for that matter). Vonage's less expensive plan of $26/mo (plus the applicable taxes, of course) includes 500 long-distance (including Canada) minutes and the prices for calling Germany the lowest we have ever had in the US (5 Cents a minute). We still have local service provided by a local carrier I really like (Sharon Telephone Company - yes their website is horrible, but I could care less because their service is outstanding), but everything except for two exchanges is a local-long-distance call or simply long distance. On top of that, Vonage provides caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, call redirect, etc. as part of the base plan. For $26, that is not bad. The same service with SBC would have been close to $45/mo and that didn't include any long-distance calling minutes (on top of that, the rates to Germany through other long distance carriers were not nearly as good). Considering that broadband is a way of life in our household, why not use it for one more thing and save some money? If you are looking for better phone service and already have broadband, I would highly recommend it. By the way, if we ever move, we don't need to change the number (even if it was back to Germany - as long as we had DSL/broadband)... another nice little feature.