Introduction
I started my tech journey back in the 90s’ writing HTML by hand. Ever since I started doing tech work for money in 2006, I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the systems and machines I’ve helped maintain and manage by doing it myself in a home lab. I credit where I am today on essentially taking the same tools from work and breaking my home network, much to my wife’s chagrin.
Keeping Costs Low
Even though I’ve been self-hosting since 2006, I had, until 2013, no real server in the house. I rented machines in data-centers for cheap, having known the best deals from working web-hosting support. I moved all of my hosting literally in-house for the better part of a decade. This saved tremendously on monthly hosting costs, even if the up-front cost of hardware was a little pricy.
However, as what I worked on professionally changed in complexity, so did my home-lab and my projects. My costs were measured in time instead of dollars, and they were annoying, but manageable.
Security and Exposure
As my position and responsibilities grew, the less I could focus on my hobby projects in long-stretches as I had in the past. Also, the more I became a potential target for attackers. After 2020 and the shuttering of physical offices in my city, the less I liked having my work and personal devices on the same network as the hosting services (even with VLANs and VPN).
Since my CISSP exam in January of 2024, I decided to essentially pull the plug on all non-essential hosting until I’ve had time to vet the services and get them into a self-compliant state. If you want to know the state of a service, see below.
Aniki.fm
Status: Down
Rationale
Aniki was originally just a wordpress blubrry site. It eventually evolved into a more dynamic site that had a wordpress backend and a nuxt v2 frontend. However, I built new version in 2020/2021, and then let the code sit for a long while. As of March 2024, the project no longer builds at all and the kubernetes infrastructure that I used to host it, while useful for keeping up with my DevOps guys, was not useful in being maintainable in the slightest (k8s is a castle of glass, in my honest opinion).
Future
Our recording is currently on hiatus for present while I, at least, get some long-term life stuff sorted out. I would like to convert the site to castopod or similar should we continue. Until then, recordings are available on Spotify .
Magic.Falseblue.com
Status: Down
Rationale
While the magic card site started as a simple php form, it evolved to have multiple backend-services, including an AI NSFW photo filter beginning in ~2015. The site never had user-management by design.
As of January 2024, more than 250,000 card had been created by people all over the world.
Future
I doubt this will return. If you found it fun, let me know!