Aardvark Daily

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Where did Aardvark go?

Regular readers may have noticed that this website effectively disappeared on Friday Morning and was gone for several days.

Unfortunately, the hosting company seems to have had a pretty major melt-down which took almost four days to rectify. During that time there was nothing to see at this address and, for a while, even email addressed to the domain will have been bouncing.

Whilst this was enormously frustrating, I have to admit that the up-time from the hosting company, which I've been using for many years, has been pretty good.

However...

It really is time to decide whether self-hosting on the server that I have sat in the corner of my room, might not be the better option.

That box is to be the machine which powers my video-server, the one which will enable me to publish videos without having to worry about YouTube's rogue AI moderation or the other issues that creators on that platform are currently battling with.

It would seem like a reasonable idea that if I'm going to be connecting a box to the Net via a separate high-speed fibre connection then I should skip the costs of paying a hosting company for their services and bring everything in-house.

Of course it means there'll be extra work required on my part and I will be vulnerable to local internet outages (which have happened) but at least I'll have 100 percent full control over most of the variables and won't be left hanging on someone else's efforts if things go titsup.

Given that Aardvark is a relatively low-bandwidth site, lacking fancy/bulky graphics and other elements that might add extra strain to my second fibre connection, I think the performance would be more than adequate for the current levels of traffic so that's not going to be much of a concern.

In the meantime, I'm playing catchup here, restoring the last few editions of your daily dose from my own backups, since the hosting company's backup is a week or so old.

With luck (it's hard to type with crossed fingers), things will be stable from this point forwards -- unless I do decide to self-host, in which case I doubt everything will go smoothly.

The real question I'm wondering now is: just what caused the outage? Did some evil sod decide to exploit the recent vunlerability in the Linux kernal that has yet to be fixed in a number of distros?

I'll see what I can find out and keep you informed.

Meanwhile, the Daily Dose is now back on track.

Carpe Diem folks!

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