Website creation.

Took me 3 days and some late nights, but I’ve finally created a website to host our family adventures!

I registered two domains using Godaddy:

• http://www.yourharts.com
• http://www.yourharts.ca

I used Godaddy for domain registration/management only; I’m hosting this wordpress site on IIS 10 locally on my server which is running Windows 10 Enterprise.

Getting the domain names to resolve to my dynamic IP issued by Rogers was tricky. I had to use a tool I found on GitHub:

https://github.com/leandrokoiti/GoDaddyDnsUpdater

This tool updates my Godaddy A record whenever my IP changes.

The only issue with hosting locally is if my server goes offline from a stupid Windows forced update then my site is unreachable!

Actually there’s another issue: my upload bandwidth is “up to” 25mbs. In practice however it’s around 15mbs. Depending on traffic to my site it may bring my connection to a crawl and not only slowing down the site for users, but also affecting my online gaming! Battlefield 1 has no forgiveness for laggy connections!

If it becomes a real issue, then I may have to look in to a host provider.

I decided to host locally because the paid WordPress plans don’t let you install plugins unless you have a business account – which is too much to spend on a personal hobby.

Next came the task of hosting all the images. To host them locally would put high stress on my server, so I needed a CDN.

I thought about using Amazon S3 storage services, but then I realized that Flickr has 1TB of free storage and a pretty nifty developer API set.

So a few PHP script modifications later and now the images in the galleries are pulled from my Flickr account, reducing my server load and decreasing your load times!

If you ever want more details on how I accomplished this, leave a comment or email me.

I’m more than happy to talk about my geeky passions!