We just finished building our new web server, Plucky. The websites were moved over to it yesterday. Like the old server it uses Apache, PHP and MariaDB. We’re watching the server to see if we have to make any tweaks on it still. Both this and our email server, PonyExpress, are virtual private servers, so no one else is on the server.
We switched from a Centos Linux distribution to Ubuntu since Ubuntu has the ability to update to newer releases. There’s a few differences in settings between the two, mainly in Apache. We are still using PHP 8.4, but PHP 8.5 is coming soon. We will wait until the first round of fixes for PHP 8.5 comes our then test it on our test server with some of our sites.
If you want to visit other site on it, checkout the Mountain Adventures web site. This site and Chris’s site are also on the server. They are going to get more updates soon, including additions to our portfolio bringing some Java applets back to life. The ability for web browsers to run Java applets was removed a while ago.
Do you have a web server that needs work or want a new one? Having your own server is a step up from shared hosting, but they need to be maintained (either by you or the hosting company). If you website has more traffic than a standard shared hosting account can handle, this may be the solution for you. They do give you the ability to more thing like running a program not available on shared hosting sites. We still do recommend making backups of the database and files uploaded to the websites and keeping them in a separate location.