The Story
by
once upon a time there was a guy who liked to mess around with the internet.
This guy liked to mess around with the internet so much that he did things that most other people who like to mess around with the internet don't do.
Once of those things was to learn, by trial and error, how to do web page design. As this was in the dim, murky beginnings of the internet, as in 1994, there were not a lot of resources available for this sort of thing, so trial and error was about the best method around.
So, by trial and error, he gained some proficiency in such things. This was not what he ever did for a living, no this was more of a "power hobby"; some money was made, but it was almost accidental.
Another thing that came from this was a distrust, and general dislike, for web hosting companies. in 1995 this person discovered that it cost at least $100 to register a domain name! and that in order to get something called a "host" for your domain name, you would probably have to pay out money (yech), money somewhere in the order of $50 a month!
Not liking this state of affairs, this person decided to go the road less traveled, and host his web pages on his OWN server. This has never been easy, but, being a "power hobbyist", this didn't slow him down. At first, it was a Dual-ISDN line at the blistering speed of 128k, hooked into a Windows 98SE desktop. then it became a Windows NT 4 server. After a few years, and a change of location, the connection grew to a 512k line, running on a Windows 2000 server. After yet one more change of location, the Power Hobbyist was Using a 768k SDSL line, and running not only Windows 2000 server, but also a Debian Linux server, OS/2, a Sun Solaris 7 server, and off and on, various others. During this period, the Power Hobbyist made more accidental income from his hobby, hosting websites for people who were tired of impersonal hosts, and wanted a really big website that they could use for whatever they wanted, and never having to pay for "extra space"; the Power Hobbyist had plenty of space!
Then something happened.
The power Hobbyists kids started to... change. they started to turn into
Teenagers.
The Power Hobbyist realized he had made a mistake. In his search for money to pay for his Power Hobby, he had taken a job in a very, very bad place; Radcliff, KY.
The schools, even for Kentucky, were BAD. Every school the kids could go to had failed "No Child Left Behind" for as long as that stupid little phrase had been spouted. The High School, which the older child, a boy, was getting ready to go to, had more crime in it than any other schools in the state except for those in "Inner City" Louisville, KY. There were not even any Private Schools they could go to. And possibly worst of all, the younger child, a girl, was very, very pretty.
The Power Hobbyist did the only thing he could think of to do; he Had his Ex-wife and her family move into his big, beautiful house in Radcliff, KY, and moved his self, his kids, the Cats & Dogs to Paris, TN.
You see, the Kids Grandmother had passed away a few years before , and left her little tiny house and the acres of wood surrounding it to the kids; Their mom had gone to the Schools in Paris, and they were GOOD schools, always scoring very high in comparison to even private schools in Tennessee.
The only problem, the only BIG problem, was that there was not any internet.
Oh, there were some things like the internet; Tennessee has very cheap ISDN, but only single channel (64k). and of course dial-up. And there is always Satellite (128k up). But none of these will let you run a server. The little house in woods was too far away from the CLEC to get DSL, and Cable didn't come within miles. And the Power Hobbyist would have had to sell his kids to afford a T1 out in the sticks like that.
So, sadly, he did what he had to. He took his many, many domains, and his many hosted clients, and he tried to move them to various hosting companies. For his main domain, that he had generated the most content for, he picked a company called Easycgi.com. It was not even slightly easy; the server had been running for almost 10 years, there were hand-written scripts, applications, components from companies dead since the "bubble" that had been coaxed into a zombie-like half-life for years; Forums with 10's of thousands of posts on forum systems that had been forced to operate well beyond their limits, databases shared between different computers and operating systems, Legacy applications that originally did 10 things that were down to doing a single undocumented but crucial thing in a way they were never intended to. It wasn't until he had finished the 2 month process of moving the hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of data that he found out the terrible secret: easycgi did not support subdomains.
This was truly terrible; one of the Power Hobbyists oldest and bestest clients (see 1998 version) had entrusted him with his website, and that website had been sitting for years at http://cfs.vrhome.com. The power hobbyist was at a loss! he tried everything he could think of; he tried to get the people at the host to fix the DNS records, he tried to pay them for another domain, nothing seemed to work. Finally, with the application of "grease", the host allowed CFS.vrhome.com to work. BUT, they would not allow it to have FrontPage Server Extensions! This was almost as bad as not having it at all; the Oldest and Bestest client COULD have used something besides FrontPage, but didn't really have the time to bother with learning a new way to do things; he had a real job that he spent his time on. The Power Hobbyist tried several things to make it work, including setting up a different website for the Oldest and Bestest client to publish to and migrating things over by hand, but this led to many, many design bugs. Eventually, the Oldest and Bestest client got a new website, http://www.gangfighters.net and moved everything there, but still, there were years of data, and thousands of websites linking to http://cfs.vrhome.com ; but it seemed there was nothing to be done.
Then, one day, something happened.
The Ex-power hobbyist, while trying to maintain (on his slow, barely working internet connection) the many websites that were slowly disintegrating into link-rot and obsolescence, noticed that cfs.vrhome.com wasn't working AT ALL! it just wasn't there!
Trying to get to the bottom of this, he finally discovered that easycgi.com had been sold! and that they now allowed subdomains to point elsewhere! oh fabulous day!
(that was this morning)
So, now, the ex-power hobbyist is trying to restore from 3 year-old backups the cfs.vrhome.com website; this will be a long, arduous process, but well worth it for peace of mind, if nothing else.