Comcast has taken my livelihood away from me. I'm no longer able to run port 80 on my IP address. My room mate who is on the same account, with his own IP address, can still do it fine. And other ports like SSH work fine for me. Something about the nature of my site must have set off a flag that led them to enforce the policy about not running servers. It comes just days after talk of Comcast tiering their internet service began, and I don't want to do business with them anymore.

It turns out that DSL is not available at my location, so my only option for self-hosting is Comcast Business, which is $95/mo (vs $50 now) and doesn't include a static IP by default. Ouch. I called them up and there is a 3Q special that puts their plan at $59/mo until the contract is up (1yr). I may do that, and get a static IP address. The plan is 1mb/s up, so it would double my speed for not much more than I'm paying now.

I have no choice but to do business with them if I want broadband at home. As for serving, I could pay to host elsewhere, but I'd need to generate some revenue first since it's significantly more expensive given my special needs (JVM, daemons).

The good that comes of this is that I know I won't be cut off shortly after I demo Soashable (next MinneDemo, perhaps?).