A lot of times, when we discuss "cancel culture" and internet censorship; we're talking about social media giants blocking or "shadow banning" western conservative voices. Even the most violent and radical progressive voices are allowed the vast majority of times. However, that's not the only way this happens. In 2021, after the riots in Washington, D.C., the Twitter alternative Parler was unexpectedly shut down when Amazon Web Services (AWS) canceled Parler's web hosting service.

It took over a year for Parler to get back on their feet and recover from the hit. Granted, Parler is far more advanced than your typical personal blog built around WordPress. However, Parler also has a lot more technological savvy and experts working around the clock to get the site back online. If you're lucky, your personal website has yourself, your spouse, and maybe a best friend or two.

KTracy.com got it start as a subdomain on a self-hosted server by one of Kevin's fans back in March of 2004, but quickly outgrew the server's limited capabilities. In 2007, we migrated the site to Bluehost; which was remarkably easy, even 18 years ago.

If that original website was built on a database, the migration to a new server would have been a pain in the butt. Plus, if that original server's owner just deleted everything from his server (the equivalent of being canceled today), we would have been really screwed. However, until the Fall of 2005, KTracy.com was a website hand coded in Notepad using HTML exclusively. Had that website been deleted, all of those files still existed on a hard drive and backed up on CDs at KTracy.com HQ. It was a different time.

Like many personal website and blog owners, Kevin Tracy rarely backed up his WordPress databases. Had Bluehost canceled KTracy.com at anytime in our history when we were running WordPress; there would have been no way to re-create the website on a more friendly hosting service.

I want to stress, we have been using the shared hosting service on Bluehost since March 6, 2007 and have enjoyed a wonderful relationship with them. No matter what unpopular opinions Kevin Tracy has shared and no matter who Kevin Tracy has offended, and no matter who complained about those things, we have never even heard so much as word of concern from Bluehost. It's been a great free speech platform for us. Talk of them canceling KTracy.com is purely hypothetical.

Indeed, using static websites has actually protected KTracy.com's content from Kevin Tracy and me more than Bluehost. There have been three or four occasions over the last 15 years where we wiped WordPress to get a fresh start, usually hoping to speed things up or make enormous changes to KTracy.com.

As a result, we actually have more functional and complete archives for Kevin Tracy's high school website on Angelfire from 2001 to 2002 than the WordPress site we replaced in 2021. Yes, we SHOULD have downloaded the WordPress MySQL database and all of the content before deleting everything; but, as Kevin Tracy himself put it, "This has been downloading for two days! Are you sure it's still working?" We are currently trying to figure out if Kevin Tracy also said, "Just forget it. Delete it all. We're done with WordPress."

That's the problem with these WordPress databases. They take forever to backup, so those of us on shared hosting servers with limited bandwidth from their ISPs and limited manpower are less likely to make regular backups. I think in 15 years, we've only ever made one backup of WordPress content that didn't involve uninstalling WordPress immediately afterwards. That one attempt was quickly met with regret because of how long it took.

Just like it was with Kevin Tracy's website in 2001, we hand code these web pages and save them to local hard drives (and now back it up to the cloud) and upload it to the FTP. If Bluehost ever did cancel KTracy.com, all we have to do is transfer our domains to a new hosting service and upload all of our files that are kept on one of our local hard drives. We could be operational again in a couple of days or less.

The more we develop KTracy.com, the more happy we are with the decision to return to static web design.