On 17 Nov, Tim Lavoie wrote:
The choice to make IPs dynamic is a business one, not technical. The choice is yours to make as a customer whether that works for you. If not, go elsewhere.
For many customers "going elsewhere" is not an option or I would have switched them all to Shaw ages ago. In many buildings MTS is the only option unless you want to pay Shaw $5000-$10000 to run a cable, which so far no one wants to do.
Unless you need hands on a physical box, there are tons of hosting setups which are reliable, inexpensive and are aimed at people hosting network applications.
Two problems: 1) control; 2) cost. No matter how inexpensive, you're still looking at adding $15-$25/month. When unfettered access to all ports (within bandwidth usage limits) should be free, why spend $250 more per year? And if you migrate off your email/web/etc services to a shared hosting service, you lose most of your control: control to do what you want with antispam, precise control over web application software, etc.
It's the loss of freedom that irks me so much. 10 years ago the 'Net was touted as the "great equalizer", where every box on it was equal. Now they want to limit your activity and say: pay $10/mo for email hosting, pay $15/mo for web hosting, pay $20/mo for DNS hosting, pay $40/mo for static IP so you can do your own hosting; or what is truly the only way to have full control: pay $150+/mo for colocating a server.