Many people use their company email addresses for all sorts of things. Others use web mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo for personal email. These weren’t good options for me as I have always had my own domains and so forth.
When my previous methods of hosting email became unreliable forcing me to make changes often – moving it around from host to host and so forth – I decided to get my own dedicated server.
Initially – around November 2001 – I put up a machine at a hosting service in Cape Town, I paid around R700 / month for it (๏ฟฝ70). This gave me space to put any kind of machine, 2 IP addresses and 1Gb of bandwidth a month. This was ok for me to put just my personal stuff on and some secondary domains for friends. I used a old desktop machine, I think it may have been a PII 450 or something.
The hosting centre then, without notice, put up the monthly fee to R1200 (
I migrated my software setup, domains etc all onto the new machine and finally got rid of the Rip-Offs in South Africa. At this point I really had just too much bandwidth and decided to start offering free hosting to friends and so forth. To facilitate this I used the excellent jail facility provided in FreeBSD. This gave me a secure environment seperate from my personal files for the use of friends.
At the time I had to rely on a badly connected machine for secondary DNS and Mail Relay services. This became so unreliable that I had to look at other options. I looked at various hosting options for virtual servers and decided to get a User Mode Linux host. I decided on RimuHosting, they offer an affordable service at $20, this gives you 4Gig drive space, 64Mb RAM and 30 Gb of bandwidth, they also have a very comfortable User Agreement that does not limit you in many ways.
Eventually after some run ins with the owner of Rimuhosting who changed files on my system without my permission I decided to move my machine to Layered Tech. I have a dedicated machine there with 2 drives, 1 Terabyte of bandwidth a month. They are ok as long as nothing goes wrong, the moment you have to deal with their support staff you are in deep trouble, so I mostly just use that machine for secondary hosting.
At this moment I provide the following services to users of my facilities.
- Primary and Secondary DNS, Secondary DNS is managed through a simple web interface. Secondary DNS is hosted in the US.
- Primary and Secondary E-Mail hosting, Secondary E-Mail is managed through a web interface. Mail hosted on my server is available via IMAP, POP or Web Mail – all also have the secure versions over SSL enabled.
- Spam Tagging using SpamAssassin, SpamCop‘s blacklist and iScan
- FreeBSD Shell services. This is a full service with all the usual bells and whistles, various text based mail clients and so forth.
- Web hosting, either simple ~user/ style hosting or complex virtual domain services. Users are able to use PHP and Databases using PostgreSQL.
- Web Counter and Log analysis using either Webalizer or Power Phlogger.
- IRC Proxies using dircproxy, but not with custom reverse DNS.
- Per user Weblogs using Movable Type.
- Photo Galleries using Gallery
- Mailing lists with user friendly Web Interface for both administrator and users using Mailman
In general, when a user or myself have a requirement that is not yet met I will find a solution and deploy it on the servers.
To facilitate backups I added another 18Gb SCSI drive and I am using this to mirror the contents of the first drive on regular intervals. All configuration is version controlled using RCS. Data from Databases are dumped daily and backed up off-site to my server in the US. The US server is backed up to the machine in London.
At this point I host email for 20 domains, secondary or primary DNS for 35 domains and a ever growing amount of web sites and so forth.
I find running this service to be very rewarding as I get to give something back to those who help me and it is also a great learning experience. In some cases people who host their domains on my machines will make donations in various forms, mostly I ask for hardware to improve the server things are hosted on. At the moment I have not paid for any of the hardware that this runs on.
Since most of what I host here are for individuals and non commercial I don’t really host commercial services unless I feel they deserve some kind of free hosting or if they offer hardware donations or assistance in paying the monthly bills. Also of cource commercial customers would have availability requirements that I would not always be able to commit too.
