About this site

From 1997-2022, this site ran on a server I administered myself. No longer.

It's now hosted on a simple shared hosting package at Namecheap. It's built using terraform and parts of it (dns, email) are hosted by google. I would probably pick nginx if I were doing it myself. I'm not.

Google charges a lot ($20/month) for HTTPS termination, which is why I host the web site at Namecheap now instead of a google cloud bucket. Namecheap accepts payments in crypto too. This is a shoe-string operation yo.

The Google infrastructure and site templates are managed "as code" using terraform. Few other tools are involved - the source code of the site is still hand-rolled for better or worse, with a little help from vscode.

guts of 1U server

Rest in peace sam.julianhaight.com, the "bare metal" server I co-located since 1997 (before VMs were a thing). Like it's namesake, the brave Sam Gamgee, Frodo Baggins' tireless servant from J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, it rarely let me down.

At one time it hosted this website as well as mail and dns for my and many other domains. Here lies it's final configuration:

Software

  • 64 bit Ubuntu Linux
  • Apache HTTP Web Server with modules for perl and python scripting
  • Postfix SMTP Mail server
  • djbdns DNS cache and authoritative server (tinydns)
  • MySQL SQL database software

Hardware

  • Supermicro bare-bones server configured by abmx.com
  • Intel 6600 (64 bit, 2 cores, 2.4Ghz, 1Ghz FSB, 4MB cache) (4780 BogoMIPS per core)
  • 4GB memory
  • 500Gb disk array (3ware SATA raid1)

Host

Sam was hosted in a Switch and Data facility in Seattle's internet nexus, the Westin building.