One of the problems of starting SFcrowsnest as one of the first online magazines back in 1991 on the pre-web bulletin board systems is that when you fast-forward to 2025, that’s a whole heap load of technical overhead
to be carrying. Ditto my science fiction and fantasy writing vocation, which has moved all over the shop with the winds of fashion, trade, and that sucking noise of Jeff Bezos slowly extracting most of the value out of the sector.
I’ve collected web space all over the place, as small indie hosting firms that were once good value and tech-savvy get bought out by private equity money before lapsing into a virtual s$£%-show over the years.
The last four days were when the straw snapped (for reasons I won’t bore you with but involved a lot of cost and a clown show of technical responses).
I went into a whirlwind of closing down old URLs, migrating hosts, and killing dead ducks, with the result that SFcrowsnest.info (my genre magazine) and StephenHunt.net (my personal site) are now residing on new hosts.
Hopefully, these new platforms will be stable, swift, and provide ample space for growth. This has been on the cards for at least a decade, but the pain of staying where I was was finally more than the pain of migrating (and boy, was there some torture during the process).
The email newsletters for both the magazine and my own blog now reside here, on Substack. The current plan is that this is where you’ll hear what’s new in the magazine, along with my novels. I’ll be installing a backup server on the above new web services in the near future, just in case Substack is less than reliable. But, at the moment, fingers crossed.
That’s it for now, folks.
May your next hyperspace translation be clean and your jump point empty.
Stephen
www.StephenHunt.net
www.SFcrowsnest.info
I miss the days of the BBS!Since they are mostly long gone, migrating, however painful, is the best way to preserve the past. Best of luck!