About this website -- technical
Guus Bosman.nl has been my on-line home for many years.
I started in June 2001 with a couple of static HTML pages and a Blogger account. I played with that for a few months, and did some experiments with PHP and a Microsoft Access database, running on an older computer in our dorm. That was fun, and I continued using Blogger for a while, but I realized that I wanted more features 'out of the box' and I looked for a content management system.
The website then run for a number of years on PhpNuke, a simple content management tool written in PHP. This was a major step forward from static HTML pages and Blogger, but the open source community around PhpNuke gradually disappeared.
CMS software -- Drupal is great
In early 2007 I migrated the site to Drupal, a much more mature content management system, again in PHP.
I've been making Java based web applications professionally since 2000. I love using Ruby on Rails for front-end development. However, my website is running under PHP. Drupal is simply a great CMS and platform and I really like its strong community and feature-richness.
I run several domains from the same server. You are now on Guus Bosman.nl, but there is also Dutch in America.com which runs on the same database and infrastructure. I'm using CloudFlare.com, a CDN, for Dutch in America.com.
My Twitter updates are fed into the system, as well as distributed to Facebook, LinkedIn, all the usual suspects. Read more here.
Operation System -- OpenBSD
The server runs OpenBSD, which has served me very well over the years. It's very easy to maintain remotely (even upgrades of the kernel can be done over SSH) and I like its emphasis on security. I've had it running since 2002 and only once somebody got access, using a rootkit, to the operating system. (An extra warning system I had set up detected this quickly and it turned out a patch for this remote hole had been available for a few months already).
Hardware
The server used to be running on a Pentium II with about 100MB memory (thank you, Edo for your hardware!). Just before I left to the United States in 2004 I upgraded the machine and now it's a 1.6Ghz machine with 1GB of memory. I've considered moving to SliceHost, but my website is pretty CPU intensive and a dedicated server is more cost-effective.
Location
Years ago, when we lived in the Netherlands, the server stood in our living room and was connected to Internet with a 1024/320 Kbit/s DSL connection. Our ISP at the time, XS4ALL, explicitly allows the running of non-commercial web servers.
My parents gracefully offered to host the server in their home when we moved to the U.S. in 2004 and since that time it has been humming along just fine. Backups are automatically made to Amazon's S3 service, and I receive a nightly database dump in a special Google Gmail account as well.
Want to know more? See the latest posts about Guus Bosman.nl.
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