»Oh no lies!

I guess none of this is true. From now until at least 4/2010, my blog is hosted again. I miss running my own server, but the deal I got is too good for me to stick with my paltry home internet connection as a host.

»Specifications

Processor: 800MHz Intel Pentium III
Memory: 192MB PC100 SDRAM
Disk space: 80GB 5400RPM
Uplink: 256kbps upstream via home DSL
OS: Ubuntu 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’ Server Edition
Software: Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5
Blogging: WordPress for life!

»Origins

When I first started my blog in April of 2005, I was young and silly. I had kept a few different blogs before then, posting multiple times a day for only a few weeks because I didn’t really understand what a blog was supposed to be. I guess for some reason I thought people would want to know every thought that crossed my mind and every other website I stumbled upon. In a lot of ways, that first year was probably the happiest time for the blog; I posted way too much, a handful of my friends read the blog regularly, and some people actually commented.

»Death

In April of 2006, my super slick hosting deal came to an end. As much as I enjoyed and learned from keeping arminvosough.com, I could not justify paying $9.95/month for it. The website died with a rather melodramatic post and a few days later my domain name was scooped up by an auction agency.

»Phoenix

Continuing my trend of learning about computing and network by means of the website, a few months later in June the website came back. I took advantage of the beginning of summer to try my hand with installing Ubuntu on an old computer. “Hey! I can set up a LAMP stack on this!” A few days of fiddling later brought the blog back at the venerable address armin.sytes.net.

»Evolution

My blog continued without much change for two years. During the summer of 2008, the summer before I began college, I took it upon myself to build a custom case for my server. The project was fairly useless and somewhat expensive but I considered it a success. Later that summer I was able to score a free domain name from GoDaddy, and my previous domain name had conveniently been dropped back into circulation. Woohoo!

»Today

As of now my blog is running basically as a public journal for myself. I do miss the days when my friends would stop by and comment on things, but I truly post in my blog for my own well being. It’s hard to explain to someone without a blog what it feels like to be able to go back and look at random posts, phases I went through, and things I did during high school and now college. In the future, I hope to dabble in some design of my own rather than hijacking and customizing other themes.

I run only open source software, and I am committed to not spending any money on my website. Besides roughly $40 which I spent on building a custom case, I have spent $4.99 on a PCI Ethernet adaptor and hopefully not too much on electric bills.