I never thought I would need to use virtualization this early although I had an inkling that I would eventually need to get my hands dirty and my head shrink-wrapped around concepts which even now boggles my mind. Virtual, virtual servers, virtual machines, these words have a nice ring to them and using them in normal conversation would make you sound like a tree full of owls, a man well-educated in the advanced technologies of the day. Well, I am not an erudite guru and I am loathe to try and keep abreast with the current technologies. I don't like the cutting edge, I dread bleeding. Let me have the proven technologies where I can find many people who have gone on the rugged early path and blazed a trail to help me make my leisurely way through an easier path.

There I was last year, spurred with the burning desire to host my own website, with two computers in addition to my trusty old Pentium III which I use for development and testing. I had bought for this project a used Dell Pentium III with 512MB RAM and a spanking new Dual-core Intel Pentium with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. The plan was to use the Dell PC as my proxy server cum firewall running Ubuntu Linux and the dual-core Pentium as my Squeak Server running Squeak Seaside and Squeak Magma on Windows XP. This is not a perfect configuration, not even remotely. This is a practical solution based on the state of my knowledge. After fits and starts, it being my first time to use Linux and Apache and also my first time to write anything in Seaside, I was able to successfully serve pages from my home. And my little website flew.

For a little while, it flew like a little bird in a sky filled with giants. And then it died. After eight months I killed it to save me the expense of static ip, broadband connection and the electricity that powered my little experiment. It was time to get serious about this website business and use a better technology. I jettisoned my Dell which had done admirably the job I had enrolled it to do. That left me with my Dual Core which I fitted with another 1GB of RAM. I would have liked to have 4GB on it but too late I discovered that the motherboard could only accommodate 2Gigs so there I was, constrained by 2GB of DDR2 RAM with the plan was to build 2 or 3 virtual machines and operate a website or two from there. One of these would be my Seaside website, resurrected from the dead and maybe a Wordpress site and another one as yet unformed to round off my Internet dreams of empire.

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