I have always been sceptical of the new generic top level domains, I saw them as ICANN shamelessly cashing in on something it had the power to control. Because of this I have until now avoided them. However my current domain name is quite long, and I have for a long time wanted something shorter, but the good ones that may be applicable to me have all been taken.

But the time has come to admit that the new generic top level domains are here to stay, so I have swallowed my pride, and found that most of the good names are gone already anyway. But one was available that was suitable, so I have registered stewart.zone. I'm going to use it to set up a website that isn't hosted on my home connection. For this I'm going to use the hosted virtual servers I already have for my mail servers, but that is going to need me to set up a backup process for them, as they will no longer just be mail servers, so rather than trust my ability to reconfigure a new server from scratch I'm going to trust in my ability to back up the configurations in a sensible way, and save myself the trouble of having to manually rebuild their configurations if they go wrong.

Also this will give me an opportunity to build a website that isn't quite so ugly, and also isn't lumbered with some of the "features" of my current site that I haven't had the heart to do away with, but are a bit rubbish. Once this is done successfully I'll look at migrating my current site over to the new hosts, and the new design, and then I won't need to open up firewall rules on my router any more.

posted at 8:38 pm on 11 May 2018 by Craig Stewart

Tags:sysadmin project comment web oops