So as you may or may not (probably not) have noticed, my site’s been off the air for the last few weeks. But despair no more, for it is back! Like a phoenix reborn from the ashes, it begins anew. Stronger, better, and faster, it burns with the almighty fury of ten thousand suns.
Or perhaps I just suffered some minor server problems and found new hosting. Whichever sounds the most interesting.
The reason
A few weeks back, the server which hosts my site (a tiny media center PC) started to produce an annoying, high-pitched noise from one of its fans. Undesirable from your laptop or desktop PC; deadly for a box sitting in a central spot in the house and running 24 hours a day. It was a choice between my website, or a good night’s sleep. So, I shut ‘er down.
The cause
To cool its CPU, my server uses a simple heatsink with a small fan screwed directly onto the fins. After more than three years of almost-constant uptime, this fan had started to wear. It didn’t run as smoothly anymore, and started to vibrate ever so slightly. These vibrations were then amplified by the heatsink, which the fan was connected to directly through three metal screws. This produced the annoying noise that could be heard throughout the house at night.
The recovery
I looked briefly into some options for fixing the problem, but seeing as the inside of my server is built like some very advanced form of 3-dimensional Tetris I wasn’t sure I could even get the fan out in the first place, much less perform any repairs. And, as someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in hardware country, I quickly decided that I wasn’t going to bother ordering any new parts or tools to try and fix this crappy €0,02 plastic fan.
It seemed I was going to have to look for alternatives. In the end, I decided to outsource the problem. I finally found some decent hosting located in the Netherlands which offered ASP.NET, and started the process of moving my domain. Now, after filling out half a dozen digital authorization forms, this process is finally finished and my site is online once more.
The inevitable
So then, after powering it up one last time in order to recover my website(s) from its harddisk, it was time to finally retire my server.
She’s served me faithfully over the last three years. She’s seen dozens of different websites, hosted applications, and blog posts fly by; there’s even been the occasional visitor request to serve. Now, however, she’ll be added to the ever-growing pile of old hardware lying in a closet in my room. Out of sight, but not out of mind. At least not for another week.