In the year 2000, I began patronizing one of the early pioneers of shared webhosting, PHPWebHosting. My particular server was named “cub”. This was where I learned PHP and MySQL, cutting my teeth building homebrew blogging platform with a name I can’t remember.
When I joined the Army in 2004, my blogging pretty much went away, and I didn’t even own a computer for over a year after that. I stopped renewing my domain name sometime later. Not sure exactly why I kept paying them, but there you go.
In 2015, I moved the site over to DigitalOcean. For one reason, $10/mo (which was what I was paying PHPWebHosting) gave me a WordPress instance, root access to the file system, and it wasn’t a shared hosting environment. With the server based in San Francisco and me in Korea, I could even install a personal VPN on it and was able to masquerade as an American when trying to bypass country-wide restrictions on apps in the Android app marketplace.
In 2017, I started using AWS as a hobby, and launched a handful of EC2 instances to help me learn the ins and outs of their API. One instance ran a script that launched other instances by itself to distribute a batch processing workload that never saw production. A year later, I would decide to launch my own business, and used AWS to run a Plesk server that would handle multiple websites.
Sometime in early 2018, the DigitalOcean droplet I was using updated to a newer version of Ubuntu. I never did figure out how or why exactly it happened, but somehow the file system would become unmounted and refused to remount automatically. It ended up taking a number of support tickets to iron out the problem, which seemed to be linked to the UUID of the physical drive.
After that, the database server refused to upgrade. I’m still not sure why or how it occurred, but today I finally figured out the cause: AppArmor was the culprit, denying access to numerous startup files required by MySQL. Once I got the database up and running, I dumped its contents and imported them into a WordPress database running on the Plesk server, and destroyed the old DO droplet.
So here we are. My personal website is now being hosted by my business.