My Xeoned Microserver caught fire and burned up!
Just kidding. |:-)
A few weeks ago out of the blue a real-estate agent told me the house we’re renting was going to be put on the market. I was surprised because owners typically list in Spring or Summer when people are looking to buy a house, but here I am a month away from snow with the possibility we’ll have to leave at any moment with only a 30 days notice and at this time the housing market is very thin. I really don’t want to be moving during a blizzard and couldn’t find a place in town this time of year. I thought the wisest choice was to preemptively move when we have some control of the timing so we moved to a house in a semi-rural area.
We’re enjoying the new house–It’s fun to see wildlife in my backyard, also my commute is great, I get to see fun and exciting things on my drive home for lunch like airplanes running off the end of the runway! The downside is the area I live in has been reported as having the slowest and worst internet in the United States.
It took me awhile to get internet because I was concerned with quite a few other things like unpacking essential stuff, fixing important things in the house (like outlets with no plates) and buying a car since I no longer live close enough to walk to work and making sure to still spend time with Kris and Eli and also prayer and meditation so I just didn’t have time to get to it. When I got around to it, getting the website back up was challenging. Cable and DSL were out of the question, there isn’t even a phone line to the house. I spent a couple weeks trying to get a local site-to-site wireless provider but none could reach us due to trees and mountains blocking line-of-site to the towers. So that left two options, Satellite or Verizon Wireless (I do get LTE here!). Both had limited bandwidth so the obvious choice was Verizon Wireless via Millenicom which gives me 20GB data per month (I am used to 250GB/month so we’re having to cut way back). I used my extra DD-WRT router to act as a wireless bridge between the MiFi and my main Tomato router to get an Ethernet connection to the server–so that’s what is serving this website up now. If you should try to visit this blog and it’s down, you can assume it’s either a snowstorm or I ran out of bandwidth–in which case it will be back up on the 1st of the next month.
Earlier in the week to see what my Google ranking damage was I did a search on “b3n” and I did see that someone on homeservershow (Wayback machine) noticed it was down–I tried to register for an account so I could reply, but I can’t seem to get the activation to work. I got an activation email, clicked on the link, but I still can’t login. But thought I’d let you know the website owner dragging worked.
Well, I’m off to look at snowplows…
I find it absolutely amazing that I’m able to read your website. Pictures, text, and your thoughts all coming from a small box in the middle of nowhere. We can rant and complain about slow Internet speeds (I am lucky to get 3 Mbps at my mountain house), but to think 20 years ago this would be almost unheard of.
FWIW, I used to host a website when I was in college (a very fast connection!), and when I relocated to an apartment and later a house. However Comcast doesn’t like residential customers running servers on their connections without upgrading to their business class service, so I had to move to a traditional website host. I enjoyed running my own server, and it forced me to learn about PHP, SQL, and other technologies.