Tag: selfhosting

My blog archive prompts me that today it is 13 years ago that I stopped hosting this site on a PC under my desk, and moved it to a webhoster, the same one it is hosted with today. I had an internetprovider that gave me a fixed IP and I had a double ISDN line at home since 1997. The ISDN lines were provided by my then employer, so I could work remotely (he was ahead of his time, my second employer in contrast argued with me whether I really needed an e-mail address at work 😉 ) One ISDN line I used as internet connection, plugged into my PC which doubled as a webserver. In 2002 we switched from ISDN to ADSL, which had better bandwidth at 6MB, albeit asymmetrical. Over time it got less reliable though and my site at times was unreachable, so in 2007 I switched it over to a hoster.

In 2010 glass fibre reached us, upping bandwidth at home to 100MB, then 500MB and then 1GB, all symmetrical. That would have been an opportunity to run a webserver at home again, but by then I used laptops only and didn’t have a machine I wanted to run 24/7.

These days however, back on a 1GB connection after a brief stint back to 500MB, and not just with one fixed IP address, but with a vast range allocated, it might be viable again to run a webserver from home again. Or multiple cheap ones, like Raspberry Pi’s. Maybe I should start with running an experimental one full time first.

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After writing this blog at Blogspot for 6 months now, I have found that it increasingly bothers me not to have personal control over content and comments and being dependent on third party services, that sometimes proof unreliable. Not really surprising since these are all free services.
Since I think the experimental phase of my blog is now over, in the sense that blogging has become part of my regular activities, I have decided it is time to take things into my own hand. For that I am now configuring Moveable Type on my home based server, and have bought two domain names.
I could not choose between the two, so I took both. The first is www.zylstra.org, which I took because it is nice to have a domain featuring my own name. (it’s a .org because all others are taken, also my name is spelled with ij in stead of y, but that has proven to be too difficult for non-Dutch.) The other is www.interdependent.biz since I think Interdependent Thoughts is a good name for a blog, and sort has become a brand in that respect. However Interdependentthoughts is probably not so attractive, thus I decided for interdependent.biz. The .biz again because all others had been taken. What do you think about these domain names?
In the coming days I will move everything from this blog to the new server, and then stop using Blogger. I will not take Blogger of line in order not to let all the references rot. Maybe I’ll rewrite the Archive pages to point to the new site, but that is not on my list of priorities now.