This is the “later” part of a previous post, where I’ll explain a bit about what happened and where things are now. The long and short of it all is that I’ve lost almost nothing important. All my photos are safe and sound, which is what the vast majority of this site was for. So starting at the end of the whole story, going forward I’m going to repopulate all the pictures and add new features! Past that, unless you want to know the technical details or otherwise have some interest in my website, feel free to stop here.
The briefest history of my website is that I bought the domain a long time ago so that I wouldn’t have to remember an IP address. Back then, the domain just pointed right at my own computer, sitting under my desk! I was sharing a folder, not even a website, of con photos. And it was so that I could access them easily, never thinking anybody else would really even know. Well, as I got more into photography the folder became a website, and I moved it onto a proper provided hosted website. That was with LunarPages, who (no surprise) are no longer around. After years and years of being a customer, their service started to suffer once a new owner came into the picture. At this time I was ready to get a VPS and run my own hosting. After an incident that is worth its own story and post in the future, I left for HostBrew.
HostBrew was (note, “was”) a small, new company and at first very enthusiastic about building their reputation. They worked with me! They even let me run a mail server! (Now that’s a story I won’t blog about and would rather forget.) That worked great for a while, then they had hardware problems. The first red flag was a RAID controller dying without any replacement. HostBrew just said, effectively, “lol sorry,” and moved us to new bare metal servers, all data lost. The next was a week-long outrage for all customers, again with the basic response of, “lol sorry.” The last problem, after which they went under (you’re not surprised, I bet) was just a complete failure to respond by their systems. Everything timed out. Tickets asking for help were never answered. That was November 2021. End of December 2021 they sent out an email saying, effectively, “lol sorry (download your data before we sell our equipment).” Not that we could, since the systems were unresponsive.
Thus I decided to finally finish my project of moving my website to docker. I had started that in 2017, but stopped because of runtime issues between my (admittedly old, no-longer-supported) version of my website software. Hey, it didn’t really need fixing, did it? Well, over the holiday break I tried again, only to realize that there was no easy solution. It was inevitable. I would have to rebuild my website starting from scratch. Well, like all things, starting over again is really just starting again, now with a lot more knowledge, experience, and wisdom. Since the time I started my website, I obtained two undergraduate degrees, a PhD, and had years of experience as a systems engineer. I’m ready for the challenge, and a new hosting provider (RackNerd).
So that takes us back to the beginning of the blog post and the end of the story so far. The website is back up, though most of the content is missing. I’ll be adding that back over time. Luckily, I have all the old logs and sufficient backups to get things back into where they belonged. But it’s also an opportunity to improve things. On the backend, everything is run and managed through docker. I also have some ideas for new things to add now that managing my website isn’t a headache. We’ll see where it goes. But I’m enjoying it so far, and I hope all my visitors do, too.