The WordPress plugin Broken Links Detector reported over 900 links on my blog that have some sort of problem. Meaning an URL can’t be reached or even the linked server doesn’t exist anymore. I started blogging about 12 years ago. Websites come and go, domain names change, blogs are moved to different locations. The internet changes constantly.
My server was dead. Not even a little blink from one of the many LEDs in the system or some other sign of life when putting the power on it. So I figured that replacing parts would be like a puzzle. Is it the power supply? The motherboard? The CPU? Or a combination of any of the parts? Replacing one of them would easily cost me about 100 euro. So I did some math, and figured that hosting was not only a relatively cheap solution, it also has many advantages (that all of you IT people can list better than me).
I went with DirectNIC, since I have been using their services for over 15 years now.
And as you can see, it just works. I had to do some work to restore the WordPress database, since the last backup I had on my NAS disks was from the end of 2015. But with some diskswapping, file copying, MySql-dumping+importing and WP-CONFIG changing it now works.
I’m happy!