Chris Mallinson

99% of the people who visit a web site don’t care how it works, or how it was built. They don’t care if you’re using ColdFusion or PHP, and they don’t care if you’re using post or get variables. The remaining one percent comprises some techie types like me, and probably you, and some people with less than honourable intentions. For members of the latter group, you don’t WANT them to know what type of technology you use.

This is a good argument for URL rewriting, as is the fact that semantic and descriptive URLs assist in search engine ranking, and general usability. I rewriting my URLs because I like the way they look. I think a website looks much more polished when the URLs are descriptive, free of variable/value pairs, and as short possible.
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There is a lot of buzz about “The Cloud” and I think it’s warranted. Every time someone gets a CFML engine running in a cloud environment, like the recent cloud successes involving Railo and Open BlueDragon, the community gets a little more interested. I’m sure there’s a way to get ColdFusion server, in certain deployments, to run in the cloud, but licensing issues would arise.
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Bandwidth concerns for web developers used to be centered around the user. I remember making sure every page loaded no more than about 30k worth of assets, just so dial-up users could see my sites in only a few seconds. Now that most users have fast connections, and the few people using dial-up are used to the wait, you can start thinking about how much data your server is pushing out rather than how much data your clients are pulling. Those two numbers do not have to match.
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There are thousands of web hosting / co-location services out there, but as far as I know, there are none that will co-locate a server that can be shipped in a shoebox, and will treat it like it belongs in a rack, next to the big boys.

Macminicolo.net does just that.  You send them a Mac Mini (or buy one from them at the going rate) and they will hook it up to a smoking fast connection in a managed facility.  You get full access to your machine, and can even (optionally) manage the power supply remotely.

Worried a Mac Mini would not be able to keep up with your needs?  You’d be surprised.  They perform very well under load, especially maxed out with RAM.  In addition to being able to host unlimited domains yourself, it’s a great way to keep remote secure backups, manage an SVN repository, or just to use as a personal file server.

I’ve been using their service for about a year, and I’m extremely satisfied.