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.
\nWhen 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.<\/p>\n
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. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":950,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devco.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nInitially – around November 2001 – I put up a machine at a hosting service in Cape Town, I paid around R700 \/ month for it (\ufffd70). 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.
\nThe hosting centre then, without notice, put up the monthly fee to R1200 (
\nI migrated my software setup, domains etc all onto the new machine and finally got rid of the Rip-Offs<\/a> 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<\/a> facility provided in FreeBSD<\/a>. This gave me a secure environment seperate from my personal files for the use of friends.
\nAt 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<\/a> host. I decided on RimuHosting<\/a>, 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.
\nEventually 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<\/a>. 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.
\nAt this moment I provide the following services to users of my facilities.<\/p>\n\n
\nTo 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<\/a>. 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.
\nAt 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.
\nI 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.
\nSince 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"