Colophon


I'm using Drupal 6 as the content management system for this website.
Each page is rendered from a database on-the-fly!

The theme is based off of Marinelli by Matteo Leoni, with minor changes.

The site is hosted at InMotionHosting.com with their Business Class "Power" plan.
Their servers run the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP bundle.

The domain name was registered at Namecheap.com.


History

When I initially started this website back in 2005, I decided to eschew traditional web hosting services. Instead, I built a server myself and ran it from my bedroom over my regular residential internet connection. I would encourage anybody who wants to gain a deeper understanding of servers, networking, command-line interfaces, databases, etc., to go this route!

This required some tinkering: Ordinary residential connections have what's called a dynamic IP address, meaning the IP issued from the ISP can change at any time. Thus, I used a free service called DynDNS to tie this IP to a DNS entry for "markbowers.org". That way, when someone typeed in "markbowers.org", it seamlessly routed to my house's IP address. From there, port 80 was forwarded on my pfSense router to my webserver's internal IP address. My webserver was battery-backed and (almost) continuously running for many years.

In January 2011, I decided to switch to a webhosting provider for better uptime and speed.

Dec. 2005 - Nov. 2006

Nov. 2006 - Oct. 2008 Oct. 2008 - Jan. 2011 Jan. 2011 - Present

PowerPC G4 533MHz
512MB RAM
Mac OS X 10.4 Server
Apache 1.4
MySQL 4 / PHP 4

Pentium III 1GHz
384MB RAM
Ubuntu 6.06 Server
Apache 2
MySQL 5 / PHP 5

AMD 4850e 2.5GHz dual-core
4GB RAM
Ubuntu 8.10 Server in VMWare
Apache 2
MySQL 5 / PHP 5

InMotionHosting.com
Business Class Web Hosting
Shared Linux Environment
Apache 2
MySQL 5 / PHP 5