I’d like to announce something quite exciting – I’m migrating my personal site and the blog over to a new server. It’s not just any old hosting solution though. I’m moving to self-hosting – using my own computer to actually deliver the site to you.
Why? Have I gone completely insane?
Well, no, I haven’t gone insane, I was anyway. 😛 But seriously, here are some of the reasons:
- Control. With my own server, I control everything. I am root. Getting this privilege with a paid-for hosting package usually needs a lot of money every month.
- No limits. With no-one to tell me how much disk space, databases, <insert commodity here> I’m allowed, I can do whatever I want. Apart from bandwidth, of course. I still have to be within the ISP’s terms (which I will be).
- Learning. The best way to learn how to do system administration, is to do system administration. I’m hoping that administering a real-life site will help me learn lots. I like learning.
- Hosting your own site is just plain cool.
There are, of course, disadvantages. There may be more downtime. If I have a powercut, my ISP goes down or I mess up some configuration, then the site will go down. Thankfully, it’s only my site, so it’s not vital to keep it online 100% of the time.
Still, you can’t learn without screwing things up occasionally.
I’m pretty excited about this move as it marks a new era for my personal site and blog. In fact, the domain name will also be changing as well, for technical and other reasons. I’ll keep the new domain name a secret until the move is completed, so I can check everything’s working properly first!
By the time you read this post, I will have frozen the database so I can move it over. Until the move is complete, I’m disabling all comments (otherwise things will get out of sync and that will not be fun).
Watch my Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible for up-to-the minute updates on the move.
