So, about five or six years ago, my original WordPress hosting provider unexpectedly took my website offline.
To give them their due, they had warned me about it by email, but that email arrived late on Christmas Eve while I was away visiting my son, then Christmas happened, New Year happened, time off work happened, and I didn’t check my emails again until sometime in early January. Of course, I immediately submitted a support ticket to them, only to discover that it was too late — my site, along with it’s data and cloud backups, including all of the great feedback from my customers that I had acquired over the years were apparently gone forever.
Shit!
I’ve been running my buisiness without a working website ever since, but finally, I found the motivation to do something about it!
From an Old PC to a Web Server
Thankfully, with a bit of digging through the Wayback Machine, I managed to recover most of those lost testimonials and turn them into a useable spreadsheet. Super. Easy bit done!
The next stage was to actually start building my site, and this time I decided there was one thing I wasn’t going to do again:
Pay (or trust) a big company to host it for me!
I had an old PC sitting on a shelf in my garage doing nothing. So naturally, the only sensible thing to do was to dust it off, install some hard drives and as much compatible RAM as I could find lying around, and turn it into a mail and web server.
I did have a slight advantage up my sleeve! About 27 years ago, I worked in the corporate IT and system administration world, so Linux, servers and command lines weren’t completely foreign territory to me. But 27 years is a bloody long time in IT!
So, that’s two things I’ve had to dust off recently!
Lately, I’ve spent rather too many evenings staring at my Ubuntu terminal, writing Bash scripts, and getting NGINX, WordPress, PHP, MariaDB, Postfix, Dovecot, Fail2ban and Certbot to behave themselves. And don’t get me started on the real nitty-gritty of things like iptables and all the other stuff going on under the bonnet!
However, the basic principle hasn’t changed much: work out what’s wrong, change something, test it, and try not to break anything else in the process, but haha, that’s easier said than done! I’ve done a fair amount of typing blatantly risky sudo commands and hoping for the best, followed by the inevitable:
“Shit! What have I broken now!?”
However, I’m like a bloody dog with a bone when it comes to this kind of stuff, and the old PC is now quietly running the HUTT&HOME website and email, hopefully 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And after losing my website once, there’s something simultaneously satisfying and terrifying about knowing that this time, I’m in control.
It may be an old computer, but it’s got a new job.
And apparently, I still haven’t quite escaped system administration world after all!
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