As my geek side wouldn’t allow me to do any different, this site is hosted in my own server, located at a tiny storage room in my flat. Besides hosting this site and being a test bed for my nerd ideas, it does lot’s of irrelevant things and one of them is to collect dust in it’s bowels. A lot of it. 24 over 7. Thus, besides all the tweaking and maintenance that I must (and love) to do as the server administrator, it also requires me to do a not so usual maintenance action: to vacuum clean it.
For most people that have a website, renting an hosting service is the way to go. And when the site is offline, it means something like an hardware or software upgrade, perhaps even restoring backups due to a cracker attack. With me, usually it means I’m vacuum cleaning it. At least, that is usually the case, but not the last time.
No, I wasn’t hacked. Nor had an hardware failure. Just when I was planning to vacuum clean it, I got into a bigger problem than dust and mites: my home electricity has been cut off (due to some mix up with the billing). That’s the reason this site has been offline the past 24 hours.
Sure, I know that I wouldn’t have this problem if my hosting option would be a more classic one. I could go on an on about the advantages and disadvantages of it – I won’t. I’m not even reconsidering it, I still think this is the best choice for me.
What caught my attention was if people ever thought about where their site sites. Physically that is. Usually their only clue is about the country, sometimes just the continent where it’s located. I guess that for most people this detail is completely irrelevant and the only reason this is interesting for me it’s due do my server being located just next to my kitchen.
Still, last night during the blackout, with not much to do, I wondered about this for a while. It’s easy (for me) to picture how and where (ideally) a big hosting company have their storage servers. That’s not what intrigues me – the competition on this area is quite big and there are loads of small to medium hosting companies located who knows where and how.
I’m aware that some of this small hosting companies have well seasoned administrators that do things the right way. But what about all the others? The ones that improvise along the way doing implementations that aren’t that different from mine. Pictures like this or this always make me smile. The location of the servers can be peculiar has well – most of the maintenance can be done remotely therefore any cheap rented room will do. As long the connection can get there, some good options are those rooms that no one rents. For instance, rooms above loud places like bars or discos, or at some bad neighborhood having at next door someone called Lolita and across the hall a terrorist making plans. But this isn’t the weirdest solution I can think of. I’m sure some of those hosting solutions around are located in attics, or creepy cellars, the kind of places no one goes- not even to vacuum clean them. Now excuse me, I’ve to do some server maintenance.