Travcoforum.com is hosted on a private server in my house, a server which is shared with 2 or 3 other websites as well.
Here's the hardware running it.
Yes, that's a 9 year old Macbook pro. It still does the job perfectly and happily runs 24/7/365 tucked away just doing it's thing.
But... It relies on my home internet connection which despite being very fast at 1 gigabit, still has all the potential fallacies of a home internet services such as unexpected downtime. Lastly, power outages sometimes throw me a curve ball, despite the fact that I now have enough backup power systems (UPS's) to run all my critical networking hardware (and this server) for at least 2 hours. About a month ago we had a power outage that lasted for 5 hours, for example.
Lastly, sometimes I just need to do things to the server which kicks the websites offline for short periods. Occasionally I need to do more extensive backups which sometimes interfere with things, and just tonight I needed to install a new printer driver for a network printer which insisted on the machine being rebooted afterwards, so the site was down for about 10 minutes while I shut down, reconfigured some wiring, and then rebooted things and got the server software alive and kicking again.
Yes, on an expensive hosted server these sorts of things are often done invisibly in the background with minimal or zero interruption, but a home based server is a little different sometimes, so interruptions do sometimes occur. Typically the site will run for a month or so at a time without any interruption, but yes, the do happen on occasion.
Regardless, if you happen to visit one day and see the site doesn't pop up, don't fear - it hasn't gone away, it's just having an unexpected or brief outage. It will return - hit refresh in a half hour and it's apt to be online again.
Cheers all.
