I will be closing my blog down for sometime. I am soon to be without an income, or a very reduced income for quite sometime, so I am taking this opportunity to make backups of my blog and to hand the server back. I have to do everything I can now to survive and this is certainly a non essential item.
The server will remain up until payment is due and then I will turn it off. I may bring it back up from home off my broadband service, but that would be a rather slow option. Things are what they are, and we all have to do the best we can right now.
Good luck everyone and Gods speed. What i will probably do once i have some normality and get back into homebrewing is do my videos, youtube costs nothing.
Rob.
I’ve been serving my website from home since I had a 56k connection and I still am on a moderate cable connection today (http://superkuh.com/). It is not slow. It is better than serving elsewhere because you have total control and tons of space and almost no friction between you and posting. And by posting, I don’t mean using some hard to maintain database dependent security-hole ridden content management system. Heck, you can even just put text files online. And writing simple HTML is quite easy when you don’t involve javascript or databases or all that useless fluff. Even generating RSS feeds isn’t that hard.
You can get free DNS (and dynamic DNS for changing home IPs) from http://zoneedit.com/ . I’ve been with them for about 15 years now and they’re great. Just go to your registrar and switch to the zoneedit nameservers once you’ve signed up. Then point your zoneedit config at your home IP. nginx is a great static webserver with very little attack surface but almost any webserver will do.
Shit’s scary and uncertain but it doesn’t mean you have to stop interacting with the world if you pay for an internet connection at all. I’d say switching to hosting from home is an *improvement*. Feel free to email me if you have questions about the process or need any help.
The biggest issue is the amount of data I serve up would slow my home broadband down to a crawl. But it certainly is an option and one i will use as last resort.
Stay safe and thanks for the comment.
Hi Rob…
I (among many, I am sure) will be sorry to see your blog go.
What sort of traffic are you serving? I have some hosting that I would be happy to donate at no cost if you are interested.
Above all, stay safe & healthy and look after your family
/ Gerry
Thanks for the offer Gerry, without going to looking to see what it exactly is, i would say a couple hundred gig per month. Fully shutting it down for now is the worst case scenario, moving to cheaper hosting is always a possibility as is, bringing it home and hosting off my home broadband but that would be god awful slow with 7mbit upload. Currently I have a co-located server, i could move it all to a low end VPS and save quite a lot. I have 4 weeks to worry about things as i have just paid the hosting fees for this month.
The trouble i have with accepting hosting from someone is that i would need total control of the machine because of how i have done my backups. If it was just the wordpress backup i could move it easy, but i have a lot of other stuff going on there that makes it difficult, and i run my email all off it also, which means needing the host to add rdns etc. Next week i will start looking for a cheap VPS most likley. Its the best option for now.
You stay safe man and I will chat with you on facebook. I think we have enough of a game plan now for me to be able to dedicate some time to some homebrew. The world is crazy LOL. Lucky we are Brit/Aussie, stoic in the face of trouble is our nature.
Some good news Gerry, the latest government bail out now includes people like me, I wont have to shut down my blog and I wont be destitute. I will be quite ok in fact. That is one huge relief. Things wont be all that extravagant, but i can keep this one luxury running and have this outlet at least. 🙂
Hate to see you go. At this juncture, I surf the web looking for any worthwhile blogs. Good Luck in your future! Layne AE1N
Things are not going to be as grim as first expected. The government is now funding 70% of my income for the next 6 months, and while I am not going to be living at the same level I previously did, i can now afford to keep the blog running. This will be my one luxury and as of next week, when my work dries up totally, I will need this outlet for my own sanity 🙂
Rob.