Well, Verizon decided to dangle a carrot in my face again. Yesterday, I received a flyer in my mailbox informing me the FIOS IS HERE!!!!! Oh I just about soiled my shorts in happiness. So I called.

No dice. It’s in my city, but not quite yet in my neighborhood. Bastards.

Anyway, the main problem I’m going to have is, as tempting as 2 megabit upload speeds are, it will be hard to justify the extra $15 a month. See, Verizon blocks port 80 on the residential lines. This is to prevent users from hosting web sites. To a point, I can understand their concern. Many users don’t realize they have port 80 open to the world and viruses can attack an unpatched system with ease.

Another thing is that they don’t want people hosting porn, spam, or any type of high traffic sites. Minus the penis post below, SaaM isn’t any of those. Neither are my business’ web site or my personal sites.

So my options are as follows

• Stick with Road runner. Yuck. Slow upload speeds mean I have to pay for external hosting of large files.
• Switch to Fios and host my crap elsewhere. Which defeats the purpose.
• Switch to Fios Business and suck up the extra cost. Wife will kill me.
• Switch to Fios residential and figure out a way to circumvent their block.

The last point is possible using a port redirect. The big problem is that the URL in the address bar gets all fubar. Usually it redirects to an IP address plus port number, and who the hell wants their web site address as http://221.55.21.87:8181?? Besides, bookmarks would fail if the IP ever changes.

Another trick is to mask the site in a <frame>. The problem with that is the URL never changes, meaning bookmarking isn’t easy. And I’d hate to have to go through all that because trackbacks would be a bitch.

So the real trick is convincing my wife the extra $15 a month is a bargain.

Anyone have a genie with 3 spare wishes I could borrow?