Hey all, welcome to my site and blog. I realized recently that I’m coming up on ten years here with this website and wanted to post some of the history and challenges I’ve run into while running this site.
Starting in 2014, AASullivan.com was a small project based upon Ubuntu 14.04LTS. Running off a VM on ESXI, it was a way to get familiar with web hosting using Linux. I didn’t really have a theme at the time apart from just wanting to post things I found interesting or helpful to others.
Over the years, I’ve had quite a lot of ups and downs. Included in this were multiple hacks and an unintentional DDoS attack which took a couple months to sort. The first hack was a site I also hosted on the webserver on an unsecured WordPress install. Thankfully backups saved the day and I was able to lock things down to prevent further issues. The DDoS was several different IPs trying to brute force their way into my primary site which caused a few issues and took some time to diagnose. The issue showed as MySQL crashing due to RAM running out. Once I found the issue, Fail2Ban was installed and configured and quickly took this issue out. Thankfully, things have been relatively quiet since then.
My next big project for the site was upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04LTS. This came with a slew of issues with PHP versions which took a weekend to iron out but I was able to get things sorted and felt a lot more comfortable on a newer and actively patched site.
Next up: SSL/HTTPS. I decided to go the LetsEncrypt route and with another weekend down, I was able to get certs for my site working along with permanent redirect to HTTPS on my site. Again, another happy sigh as the site was just a little more secure. This along with another upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04LTS and I was up to date and running the latest software.
The final iteration of the current site was moving everything from one server to another. I ran into some issues with the former systems during the upgrade process of Ubuntu and ended up needing to build an entirely new server to handle everything. The migration process took about a week to get ironed out but everything was successfully moved to the new host and this has been running for about a year now without issue. Knock on wood, this is the last big move for the site.
With all of this, I’ve learned more about website security, OS patching, upgrades and migrations. It’s been a blast, albeit quite frustrating at times. But with the frustration comes accomplishment and success. A fair trade in my book.
Happy 10 years, and here’s hoping 10 more!