The end of an era – no more self-host

After a decade of static IP and reasonable bandwidth I finally ended my ‘experiment’ and ‘learning lab’ which was self-hosting.

Before we moved to the US I ran NetWare 5.1 from my WW2-era bomb shelter under my house in Nottingham. This was the home for my email (running NIMS – subsquently NetMail) and a semi-static list of resources, links and thoughts.

After the move to the US the server went through NetWare 6.5 and then on to Red Hat Linux 7, then to SLES 8. SLES 8 served as an admirable photo and notepad written blog platform for when kid #1 appeared in mid 2003. The handwritten weblog soon evolved to blogger.

In early 2005 the number of photos and the number of blog updates grew too large – and a multiple update to SLES 9 and WordPress was called for. NetMail moved from Red Hat to Windows Server and then on to SLES 10 (at the time showing little innovation, shortly after sold off) up to Google Apps.

The final incarnation of the blog server was running SLES 11 SP1 on top of Hyper-V/Windows Server 2008 R2. Still running WordPress and all of the various addons.

The server is now offline; the VM backed up – it’s going to be rebuilt as a media server.

The blogs and photos are all now hosted up on GoDaddy – and mail is hosted Exchange.

It’s been a great learning lab – firewalls, hosting, Apache, MySQL; it’s given me some great experience with change control and planning – and sometimes things just went wrong.