Hosting Update
In the beginning of the 21st century, a bunch of my friends/coworkers decided to collaborate to get an affordable internet presence. Running stuff off of your home internet was strongly discouraged (then and now), but the “cloud” didn’t quite exist yet either.
Our first attempt used an early cloud hosting provider, ServPath. This was before virtualization was well established, so this provider rented physical hardware that they managed. Our host was named “zak”, and was the beginning of all of our personal online presences. We all did email for ourselves and had web pages, all hosted on this server.
This worked, but after a few years we deemed this too expensive. Another friend and colleague recommended that we just buy our own hardware and get it hosted in a “colo” facility, and, by the way, here is a “colo” that you can use. We pooled some money and ordered a 1U Celeron-based computer for this. This machine became the successor to “zak”, “zeke”. This move happend in 2005 (approximately.) We ended up hosting this hardware in three different “colo” facilities. The final and by far longest tenured one was nova.org. By this time, we knew some of the volunteer admins for nova.org, and thus, this was a reasonable home.
By 2010, we were already thinking of upgrading our original host with new hardware. Initially we pooled money and just bought a computer. This time, we were planning to use a decommissioned host from one of our employers. However, this was more planned than done.
Somehow, this computer held on until early 2019, when we finally replaced the hardware. Since everything on this host was lovingly hand-crafted installs of our services, migrating hardware is a little awkward. This 2019 migration killed at least one long-standing service that zeke was provding: a jabber service. There was an attempt to get it running again, but by this point, the need for a jabber service had greatly diminished. I had personally long since stopped using it.
In Feburary 2023, I redid zeke’s DNS setup and realized that out of the 13 zones it was hosting, only 5 were actually active on zeke. The rest had (old) data, but were effectively dead. In November 2023, we discussed upgrading the operating system – we were running CentOS 7, but that was going to be truly end-of-life in June of 2024. We nominally agreed to switch to CentOS 8 Stream, but we never quite got around to it.
This brings us to May 2024, the end of the line for this shared hosting experience. By this time, from the original 5 participants, only two of us were actively using it for hosting. Nova.org, our “colo” provider, is ending its service, so all tenants must find new homes. In our case, each of us have moved to our own cloud hosting solutions.
As of May 17th, this blog and related services have now migrated to a linode instance. This migration was not terribly difficult, but for blacka.com, this is mostly because the number of services that needed to be migrated was fairly minimal.