Why

For years I have been using the hosting services of Infomaniak and I am very happy with them.  I can warmly recommend them for excellent and competent service.

But there is nothing like having complete control.  I wanted a few more servers on the same domain, which, understandably, Infomaniak disallows for commercial reasons (someone has to pay for the filets-de-perche + Chasselas) and I also wanted server-side scripting in something else than that abominable php language, and, understandably, for security reasons Infomaniak does not allow common clients like me to install their own scripting packages.

Internet

In February 2012 we got a fibre optic link to the house.  That gave us a symmetric line, with 100Mb/s up- and download.  It was a prerequisite to installing any sort of home server.

Hardware

I had been looking at a suitable machine to use as server.  Then at the LiveCode conference of June 2012, through unimaginable luck (I must have used up all my luck for the next twenty years at that event) I won the raffle:  a Foxcon Nettop machine.

This is a tiny thing, 24mmx136mmx190mm, with 60GB of solid state storage (also known by the misnomer of solid state "drive").  It runs on an Intel Atom D2700 2.13GHzx4 with 4GB of memory.

It came with everything I needed installed, including the LiveCode server-side scripting plugin.

Its most important characteristic to me is that it uses only 13.2W of power.  Given that we pay our electricity 0.073€ per kWh, that means it costs about 8.5€ a year to run.

Software

I do not particularly care for Unix as an OS, but there seems to be no rational alternative for server software, and the Nettop came with Ubuntu Linux.  That's fine for me, since I'm only using it as a server.  I usually describe Unix by the phrase Before you can achieve anything in Unix you have to achieve something else in Unix first. because that is what I have consistently observed when watching Unix geeks at work.

At least the Ubuntu people have the decency to provide versions with "Long Term Support".  I hate to hear a response along the lines Ah, but your <whatever> is six weeks old, things have changed since then.

And running Apache as a web server is fine.

The tricky part was to set up the OS so it would run a vnc server before asking for an obligatory login.  I wanted the server in the basement next to the router, but work on it via vnc from my machine in the living room.  But if I restart the server remotely, I need to get the vnc connection before logging in, otherwise a trip to the basement would be necessary for each restart.

I thank here some Linux-enabled friends who through some magical incantations helped me to get that working (their names are not mentioned because I have not asked their permission yet).

Installing the LiveCode web server plugin was easy.  So you will not see any php on this site, but you may notice pages with names ending in .lc .  It is also possible to replace that other abomination called javascript with the more reasonable language LiveCode, but unfortunately that means either requiring each user to install a plugin into their browser or convincing the major browser suppliers to incorporate LiveCode alongside javascript.  Pretty much hopeless today.