About Black Flag Designs

With the recent move to “Cloud” based services I felt the need to do something different. I personally like to have a little control over my web sites and services. I don’t feel comfortable putting my faith into a mega-corporation. So out of the desire to do things myself, I started this little project.

The first big push came when my wife wanting a website for a book she had just finished writing. Sure, it would have been easy to just let her sign up for a blogspot account or a normal wordpress blog and let her point and click her way into a bland platform.

I just couldn’t do it. Many a night when into editing her logos to get the right text and color balanace. Hours into adjusting side bars, widget colors, and transparencies (that I think I was the only one who noticed). But once it was finished she was thrilled, loved every inch of her shinny new web site. The feedback from her and several other people who happened to comment on this new site kind of pushed me into doing a few more projects for those around me.

But…. the website was only one small part of the problem. Back at this point I had what I thought was a great web host, one of those unlimited everything plans for $6.00 a month. I was thrilled when I first signed up. Then I started to actually need performance and stability. I took notice that this wonderful plan started to show its limits just when her site was taking off. The one day the server died. A couple of the websites I was now hosting were down, and it was completely out of my hands. I did not like being that out of control of my own projects.

Now everything is hosted and controlled by myself, If one server fails I have the ability to restore backups to another server, change some DNS settings and POOF, we are live. That out of control helpless feeling is gone.

So what started out as a simple website has turned into much more and keeps growing.