I have hosted the site at home since the beginning. The main reason was that the company where the domain was hosted had limited disc space with their cheapest option and I wasn’t prepared to pay for a heavy duty option with 100’s of email addresses etc. So I opted for the Mail Only option with the physical site sitting on my own server, just linked from the hosting. Trouble is the world has been changing at an enormous rate and the number of DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks was growing exponentially. It just became too much work to constantly have to adjust the code protecting the server and so I decided to look for another hosting company to deal with. The number of companies offering hosting has also grown and I found Junda.nl who gave me the room for all my media files at a reasonable price, so let them deal with the hackers (bots). Once I had transferred the domain and uploaded the files setting it up was pretty straightforward. Christmas 2025 is just behind us and I’m looking forward to a peaceful New Year.

Well the site ran OK for years on old laptops but after running non stop for the last 8 years my old Siemens-Fujitsu (ex-work) laptop was beginning to struggle a bit. Not having access to retired laptops anymore (retired) I decided to migrate to a Raspberry Pi headless server. It’s not the newest model, it’s a RPi4B which I had been running on my LinuxCNC machine in the workshop. The CNC is now running on a RPi5. I haven’t been able to find enough time to do all the updates I wanted to recently – just too busy with other stuff in the workshop, but that needs to change.

Well I’ve eventually got the site up and running on a new server. After configuring a newer machine with a LAMP installation on a Debian8 OS at the end of last year, I tried to export the old database and import it on the new site. Unfortunately without much success. The old site was not structured that well (I learned a lot since it started 😊) and needed a lot of correction to get it to work well, so I decided to build it again from scratch (lots of copy/paste). The last few days have also been a bit stressful as after going live I had some problems with the Apache web server crashing. Traced it to some PHP errors inherited from the old site, god knows how that ever worked as it did. Anyway, still a little fine tuning to do but hopefully it should perform a little better than on the old machine.