I finally deleted my cloud server that was hosting a website that was used to practice web development. It existed for around 2 years and was a simple Ubuntu server that ran only Apache and had 1GB of RAM. I paid $5.50 monthly.

I kept it online all this time while I attended school. Though it was unnecessary, the website was published, had a domain, and a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Although I learned most of this in school through my great professor Andrew Smith, the hands-on approach of doing it by myself reinforced my knowledge on how the web worked.

Andrew Smith is also the one who inspired me to undertake this project. His very own portfolio managed to convince me to do the same. You can visit his portfolio here.

I had many doubts and was lost in what I wanted to do in my life. He is one of the only professors that I truly felt inspired by to continue my IT journey to become a system’s administrator. Though obviously I have to get my foot in the door as a help-desk first (no company would trust me to manage their systems yet).

Anyway, why did I decide to delete the Ubuntu server? Well I decided to take the self-hosting route. I wanted to take matters into my own hands and learn the management and administration of servers.

Though there is still lots to learn, the plan is to host different types of services that may prove useful. Possibly a Password Manager and a DNS server is up next, who knows?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the portfolio and this blog is both self-hosted.