Up until about 9 years ago, I had a server rack in my home office. At one point, there were as many as 12 servers running on it, running websites, DNS services, email , NNTP, and a variety of other services.

I blogged about this a while back.

As time went on, I started to recognize the benefits of running services in the cloud. This meant everything from moving email to GMail, to running web and DNS on a hosted server at Rackspace (then known as SliceHost).

Eventually, I had no computers in the house at all, except for my work-issued laptop.

A little while ago, I started to miss my servers, for many reasons. I still run some mail services on my VPS at Rackspace, to do things like mail aliasing for a variety of domains, and of course I still run all my own web servers there. But there’s something about having a server that you have to physically maintain that keeps your skills going in ways that you just don’t have to when it’s out there somewhere.

A year or so ago, I found a refurb Dell machine for next to nothing, and put CentOS 7.1 on it. That released in April, so it must have been about then. For a while I didn’t do much with it, other than test OpenStack installs. But after a while I brought up a Minecraft server on it, running the Bukkit distribution of Minecraft, to play with family members. Then I opened it up to a few friends.

This Christmas, one friend did a treasure hunt for her kids in the Minecraft world, which was incredibly cool. I’ve seen them on the server a number of times since then.

When I posted on Facebook about this a few days ago, someone from ArcLight responded, saying I should host my server there, which brought on this trip down memory lane. No, Seth, while I appreciate the offer, and I’m certain you’d do a better job than I, running it myself was the entire point. Thanks, though, and I wish you well with your business.