Helvensteijn.com

I spent the last few hours copying everything from the old server to my new virtual machine. And a few minutes ago, I updated the DNS entry for the helvensteijn.com domain. It’ll take some time for the change to propagate across the internet, but soon, everybody should have this web site served by my new server.
If you see this post, that means that your DNS is up to date and you got this page from the new server.

Just two days ago, I received my new iMac. And this night, my new virtual machine went online. It will be running this web site in the near not-too-distant future.

Right now, this site sits quite comfortably on a shared hosting account. However, shared hosting has its limits, and with a virtual machine (a so-called Virtual Private Server), I have root access so I can do with it whatever I want. And it comes with its own IP address, so I can finally set up secure (HTTPS) access to my web site with the certificate I already own.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks setting everything up to replace my existing hosting account. Apache, PHP and MySQL are all running but still need to be configured properly. Then, I will also need a mail and DNS server, neither of which I have experience with. So I’ll have to look into that as well.

My current hosting account won’t expire before April 2009, so I’m confident that I have everything set up by then. Somewhere between now and then, this web site will move to the new server.

The specs of the VM are more than enough to even run Windows XP smoothly. For a server however, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me. So just like my home server, it runs Debian Etch.