Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog gets a new home

I have a few colleagues that know that this little real estate blog is actually hosted on a server within the confines of my own office.  Having a blog on your own server is called “self hosted”, which for a real estate blog is actually quite rare (I might be slightly insane).  I built and maintain the server for better and sometimes for worse.  The better part is that I have complete and total control (I have issues with the word “no”).  There isn’t anything that I can’t decide I want to put on the server, or allow the server to do.  The worse part is that if there is ever a problem, the problem is always my fault or mine to fix.  The buck starts and stops right here.

Last Thursday morning, at about 5am, APS decided to take the power down for my office building.  We were told this would happen Tuesday night, but apparently I didn’t get the memo with the revised date.  Of course, the server has a UPS (uninterrupted power supply), but it will only run so long, and unfortunately it wasn’t quite long enough for all of the servers and network equipment I have running in the office.  As a result, the blog was offline for a couple of hours early Thursday morning.

Since there was some down time, I decided Thursday morning was as good a time as any to move the server to a better location.  It had been housed in the server room at my office off Loop 101 & Bell Road in North Scottsdale.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that spot, but we only have a T1 network connection there, and at peak times, with the 20+ computer users  surfing the web simultaneously, the server sometimes delivered pages a little slower than I would have liked.

My wife, Dr. Jan Belt, actually owns and runs Oxford Learning with locations in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills.  The Fountain Hills location has a faster internet connection than my office, with the additional advantage that it has fewer computers there.  Thus, overall, that location is vastly superior to this one in terms of available network bandwidth.  Accordingly, it’s been a low priority, “wish list” task to move the blog server there one day.  Given the unexpected down time, Thursday turned out to be that day.

Here’s the server in it’s new location:

As you can see, wire management isn’t one of my strengths.  If you are curious, at this location, we also have a Windows Small Business 2003 server (the black box under the keyboard), which is the firewall to the center, handles email, security, and file storage/backup.

The Linux server (where this blog resides) is in that silver case in the foreground.  For those super geeky among you, it’s a Xenon powered, fully redundant, rack mountable server, with 3 power supplies, hot swapping raid drives, and all the other cool things your mother warned you to stay away from.  (You can look, just don’t touch.)

You’ll note this server room also houses various paints, copy paper, and tons of other things typically found in a storage closet.

With any luck, the server will be happy for a long time in its new home.  FYI, my UPS at this location told me there was a short (5 second) outage Friday night.  It also told me there had been  8 similar outages over the last 6 months.  A UPS can handle 5-10 seconds just fine.  Or even 15 minutes.  It’s those 2+ hour power outages that are a killer…

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