When I started this site decades ago, I followed the usual path at that time to launch sites, shared hosting. There were many vendors to choose from but nothing like the quantity and diversity of what’s available today. I registered the domain, settled on a small vendor for $5/month, got my cPanel and terminal login and off I went.
My server didn’t have much processing juice, storage, and bandwidth compared to today’s levels but plenty enough to host my website and email and other services within the same account. Things were running smoothly but as you’d guess, the account eventually started to push the envelope with the hosting limitations and over the next few years I migrated from vendor to vendor in the perpetual quest for more resources and better prices.
Still all this time I was a slave to the hosting companies and their rules. If my services were abused by outsiders my account was suspended. If my site was spamvertized, my account was suspended. They’d change prices, modify account agreements, deprecate services, migrate servers, upgrade products, get merged or acquired and I had to go with the flow.
So a few years ago I finally decided to give self-hosting a try. I signed up for Comcast Business with static IP addresses, got a decent used computer and migrated all the services to a corner of my home. I was paying more for business Internet at home but I was saving on hosting costs.
Self-hosting Server at Home
This arrangement worked fine for many years but there were downsides too and with the passage of time those downsides became more prominent. To cite a few,
- Being in a residential zone, power outages are inevitable and my puny UPS couldn’t handle long blackouts, such as those arising from intense storms.
- Computers and equipment crash or power may be cut because of workers or a tripped breaker. If there’s no one at home to power up the equipment, services would remain offline.
- The ambient temperature must be kept at a reasonable level. That means running the A/C on hot days even if no one is at home.
- Hardware failures would mean outages until parts could be replaced and of course a good backup strategy is a must.
- Software updates are necessary to support the latest or minimum required protocols or to patch vulnerabilities. For example making sure that TLS1.2 or IPv6 are supported or patch for Shellshock or Heartbleed bugs.
- Monitoring and battling abusers and hackers become a daily stressful job.
- With the static IP, it becomes impossible to be even slightly anonymous while surfing, unless one pays for a separate internet service.
In short, self-hosting became way too onerous and the cloud had finally reached a robust point where migrating back to providers could be a prudent move once again.
The first service to be migrated was email. I have covered the email migration to Google Workspaces in a previous post and have not looked back. The stress relief was almost immediate.
A few months later it was time to migrate the web services. For hosting I chose Digital Ocean. I had used Digital Ocean before for my day job and was impressed with their facilities and prices. Unlike the bigger players in the cloud space such as AWS or Azure that can inundate users with options, Digital Ocean has simple and straight forward options and pricing to choose from. I quickly set up a droplet (their parlance for a virtual server), transferred the files over, tested the web services, fixed the errors and incompatibilities and finally put the server into production. (My referral link, Get $100 credit with Digital Ocean.)
Shutting down the home server for the last time was a bitter sweet moment but there was no turning back and there was a tremendous feeling of relief.
The final piece of this project came with the addition of Cloudflare. Essentially Cloudflare is a web acceleration and SSL/TLS termination service and they have a lot of free services for the small operators. A few noteworthy advantages of Cloudflare are,
- IPv6 reach. If a website is only available on IPv4, suddenly it’ll be accessible to all IPv6 clients as well.
- Powerful and flexible firewalling and security capabilities, including DDoS handling.
- Latest TLS and HTTP protocols.
- Powerful web caching and acceleration features with automatic CDN.
- Reliable and fast DNS hosting.
- Web analytics.
A few months have now passed since I moved my server to the cloud and perhaps the only regret is not doing it sooner. I am saving money by using less power at home, terminating the static IP’s, and downgrading to lower internet speed. But more importantly I am saving my sanity by drastically reducing the stress of maintaining my own server.
Also, with the static IP’s gone, I can now replace the Comcast assigned cable modem with my own modem and hopefully save even more money every month. But that’s another project and maybe another post.
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