I used to host sgmlguru.org in my basement, using an old Debian box and a dynamic DNS feature in my VDSL router. The site would go down at regular intervals, sometimes because I got a new IP address and the DynDNS service didn’t follow, and sometimes because that box runs Debian Unstable and I’m an apt-get junkie, updating the system at least a couple of times a week.

This was rather unreliable and didn’t reflect on my internet presence very favourably, so yesterday I finally had enough and bought myself a $7/month VPS at VPSDime. Nothing fancy, just Debian 7 with 6GB RAM running on OpenVZ. While I’m not a expert by any means, I do have some command line experience on Debian, so setting up a basic server with WordPress and some other stuff via SSH was extremely easy.

I have to say I’m really, really pleased.