Some people may have noticed this website was offline for a few hours yesterday. This was because I changed my hosting package to one based here in the US of A. I am still using the same company but it’s US based equivalent. I am saving $260 per year by this switch and I have more features than I had before. This is because of the high cost of high speed fibre optic connections to Europe from the US. All fibre optic internet backbones originate here in the US so it’s much cheaper for hosting providers to sell cheaper hosting packages. For example I now have 120GB webspace and 12,000GB of data transfer as opposed to 8GB webspace and 100GB of data transfer. I am happy with the new package and more importantly price and was impressed with the speed of transfer of all domains. Everything was transferred over in less than a day. The domain that took longest to move was this blog because of it’s .uk extension. I had to move the domain name from 1&1 United Kingdom to 123-Reg to be able to add the domain to the 1&1 US control panel as an external domain! Apparently this is because of conflict of interest between the American and European brands of 1&1 Internet. I’m not prepared to pay UK prices when I am not even living in the UK any more! Compare: 1&1 United Kingdom || 1&1 United States.
Renault have joined Ferrari, Toyota, BMW and Red Bull in their threat to quit F1 over the £40m budget cap for 2010. My stance still hasn’t moved from what it was; if they don’t want to compete under the rules and regulations of the sport, don’t let the door hit you on the way out! McLaren Mercedes haven’t as yet threatened to quit but they say they aren’t in favour of the cap and two tier system. I believe McLaren joining the threat to quit will tilt the balance in favour of the manufacturers and the abandonment of the cap. Although I think that McLaren won’t want to rock the boat right now after their recent indiscretions. I believe that the FIA will cave into pressure especially with Ferrari being the plaything of commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone. I guess we’ll find out at the end of today’s meeting between teams and the FIA. I would like the FIA to call the bluff of the teams threatening to quit, see if the teams really have the balls to pull out of F1. They are in F1 because it suits their commercial interests not because of the sport itself! Anyone who believes all this furore is not about commercial interests for the car makers are very naive. Reducing costs and creating a more level playing field is vital for the future of F1 as independent teams can not afford to spend money like it’s going out of fashion, over $3bn was spent in 2008 by all teams, with the majority of that being spent by Ferrari, McLaren, Toyota and Honda. Things need to change to sustain F1 in these tough financial times. The sport will stagnate if things stay as they are; TV audiences will dwindle, no-one like to see processional races, we want to see wheel to wheel racing like we had in the 80s and early 90s. And the independent teams will slowly vanish from the grid because of sponsorship deals drying up as companies try to save money and F1 becomes less appealing to potential sponsors!