For the past year every time I’ve randomly checked on my blog to see if it’s still up and running okay, it’s always down. I’ve been hosting this blog myself on DigitalOcean using a Linux Virtual Server for the past 7 or 8 years, and once upon a time it used to run no problem for months or years without any maintenance or anything. Occasionally I’d have to log in to DigitalOcean and restart the server to get the site back up, but that was rare and would normally always do the trick.

Today I saw the site was down again and in the WordPress dashboard it advised that I should update my PHP version which required me to log in to the Linux server from the command line. Then it dawned on me… I’ve never upgraded my server ever. It’s still running the same version of Linux it was running back when I started the blog 7 or 8 years ago.

So then when I actually tried to go and update stuff, I noticed I couldn’t update anything. I think the Linux version on this thing is so old that none of the linux/ubuntu commands work for updating things like they normallhy would (or at least that’s my theory on why I wasn’t able to update or upgrade anything).

Anyway, I’ve got the site back up and running again, and I updated my WordPress version, but I was not able to upgrade PHP or my Ubuntu Linux version, but I’m glad my old site is back up and running. I used to get a decent amount of traffic from Google but I think I’ve lost all my SEO because the site was always down and unavailable for months and months on end without me noticing. But I’m back! And maybe when I’m feeling up to it, I’m sure WordPress has a feature where I can go export the blog to some sort of file, then I can go into DigitalOcean and just make a brand new virtual server and move everything over to the new virtual server, but I’m not really feeling like doing that much work tonight for my silly website. But hey I updated my header image here on the blog and wrote my first post in a year, so it’s good to be back. Hopefully I’ll have something worth writing about soon. Most things these days get posted to social media and hosting your own site is becoming much less common, but there’s something cool about the free and open web / internet, and I love having my own little slice here at www.topherpedersen.blog on my $7 per month DigitalOcean virtual linux server.