Over the past few weeks I've started the switch-over to a self-hosted solution for slickhouse and the other sites I maintain.
The first hurdle was leapt over with few problems - as I've now got a decent web server up and running within slickhouse itself. A full article will appear within the near future, once the software configuration has been completely tweaked. In the meantime, I can confirm it's running Windows Server 2003 R2 with IIS6; Pearl; PHP and MySQL - the latter two of which are required for WordPress.
The web server is running under within Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, with the host O/S being another 2003 install. The host machine is my upgraded Fileserver - consisting of an Athlon XP 3000 (Barton); 2GB PC3200 DDR; MSI K7N2; 120GB main drive and 4 x 250GB data drives. So far, benchmarks have proved that the setup is on par with the current machine that slickhouse is hosted (shared) on.
Although there's currently only a holding page on the web server, for [domain no longer active], it'll soon host slickhouse.com; lazlow.net and babysfirstblog.com, along with any future domains.
The server itself has been up and running for a few weeks and has already received a few hack attempts - mainly via ftp, but none have so far been successful.
Initially, I was going to be running 2 Virtual Servers in tandem - the first being Server 2003 for static sites and the second being either CentOs; Litespeed or Ubuntu Linux Server. However, as I work with Windows web servers on a day-to-day basis at work, I eventually opted for purely Server 2003. After many late nights of trying to get PHP and MySQL playing ball, I got WordPress working successfully too on IIS (more detail coming soon).
So, all that's left now is to transfer several domains that are with my current host (UKHost4U) to GoDaddy, my new domain registrar. This is where the tricky part has taken place - it's a lot of hassle to transfer a single domain from one registrar to the next; even more hassle when transferring several, with differing TLDs. I'm still awaiting slickhouse.com; slickhouse.net; lazlow.net and babysfirstblog.com to be transferred. Unfortunately, GoDaddy don't currently support the transfer of .uk domains, so I need to find an alternative way to control slickhouse.co.uk.
Once the domains are all within my control, I can then start setting up DNS for them all - via DynDNS.com. Coupled with my recent router upgrade to Smoothwall, this will allow me to host the sites from a dynamic IP. Then it's just a case of pointing the domains from their current IP to the new web server, in slickhouse.
I'll keep you updated with how the Switch Over goes. Hopefully there will be minimal downtime to the sites during the coming months. If anyone's looking to host their domain/site at slickhouse let me know, as there's plenty of space!