This is essentially the other half of Jon's "I Quit" post. While Jon is now working on Goats full-time, I'm working on Goats no-time, except as part of a larger project.
For the past year or so, I've been taking the underlying core of what makes the site work, and adding a layer on top of it to make it work for multiple sites. Last year's launch of megaGAMERZ was an initial test of the system, and really helped iron out some of the underlying bugs. Yesterday, Real Life made the switch, and is now, like Goats, a customer of Dumbrella Hosting.
Despite running a couple of very large traffic sites, we're still theoretically in beta testing, while I finish adding the features I think are necessary to be a high-quality webcomic hosting company.
My goal is to be a replacement for the high traffic sites that currently have a completely customized design, running on software they've assembled the bits and pieces of themselves. I don't think that artists should have to worry about maintaining a MySQL server or that their php or forums installation has all the latest bugs patched. At the same time, they shouldn't have to sacrifice the layout or design of their site to have those features. If you're a webcomic, then that's as much a part of your identity as the comic itself.
So, why Dumbrella Hosting? Well...why not? I'm working with the inimitable R Stevens on this, and it just made sense to use a name already known for high quality in webcomics for high quality in hosting comics.
It's been a fun 9 years as as part of Goats, and I'm really happy that I can use what I've learned in that time to do something that keeps me involved with the webcomics community and lets me really leverage my skills, which are decidedly not in drawing comics. In short, I'm really looking forward to making the technology that I think has made the Goats website one of the best and most unique in the community available to other artists.