a new server for the site .. again
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
It's scarcely been 18 months since I last migrated this website to a new server, but I've done it again; with a twist. For the first time in twenty years, I'm now running on my own hardware again. Whereas the last server was a low-end thousand-dollar Sparc server from Sun Microsystems, this one didn't cost two hundred dollars and it runs an obsolete (very) low-end Intel server. All hail AliExpress, the site where you can find just about anything. I've got a two-year-old external solid-state drive attached to it, and I manually run backups of the whole thing on a nearly daily basis. None of it's what you'd call professional, but it's certainly enough for the extremely low levels of traffic that these sites generate.
Today's fun came in a final run-through of the latest in the string of virtual machines I'd been running on Digital Ocean for the past four years. I'd already migrated all of the systems configuration to the new system and the data as well. I'd also transported all of the live data that makes up the site. But there's always something more, and in today's case I was carefully running through a lot of the automated jobs and other bits and pieces that make up the whole. One of the fun bits was working out how to tell the DNS provider every time that the IP address changes at our home - where the new server lives. I wound up writing my own API client, which required that I find a service I could reach out to for the public IP of our home. This last bit is surprisingly tricky to get on your own.
IT has long since moved on from what I'm doing but I don't have the resources at present to do things like image the operating system and make a container for immediate release to some new server hardware. Farewell to tolowa and hello wendat.
All in, I'll save $144/year on the hosting, which covered the server, a secondary storage unit, and backups (which I never used, because I have my own). I'll have to bump up the werneburg.ca domain from a $15/annual DNS-hosting level to a $35/annual bracket to support the dynamic DNS feature. But since that bracket also includes email hosting, I'll be able to relocate email service for werneburg.ca from some Belgian outfit I'm currently using. This will save me $40 a year. In short, I'll save $164/year, neatly paying for the server hardware every year. Which is good, because the server and the external drive I've attached won't last forever and unfortunately both decay in unclean ways rather than suddenly dying, so I'll potentially suffer from degraded service for quite some time.
🤔.oO(I should by a stand-by server in advance!)
Now, whenever anyone reaches emuu.net or werneburg.ca, they'll be interacting with a system that's no more than fifteen centimeters from me, Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 20:00 every day. ;^)