18 years of server hosting with the Faculty of Science IT Unit ends in 2016!

In 1999, I attended a two hour html class at Faculty of Science’s CITA, conducted by Frederick H. Willeboordse and assisted by Keith Phua. Each of us in the class was setup with a personal server hosted by the Faculty of Science and I was taught a few common HTML commands and very importantly, FTP.

With hosting solved, I experimented with my site to gain confidence. Soon NUS was granting all my domain requests to setup several websites. Anything was possible, it was just a matter of having enough time. It was the Dropbox, Google Drive and WordPress of that time. Some highlights are reflected here.

Today, the cloud has eased the process incredibly and I am fascinated – last week, from the bus, and with just my handphone, I was able to send my student’s theses to a colleague minutes after he emailed!

Well, today, I received the email I had been warned about – the Faculty of Science IT Unit (ITU) will cease its web hosting service from 31 Oct 2016!

So the probable plan off the top of my head is:

1. Coastalcleanup.nus.edu.sg – likely merge with the existing coastalcleanup.wordpress.com. Critical pages are already have coastalcleanupsingapore.org subdomains, so I will update those.
2. Sea.nus.edu.sg – shift some material to LKCNHM webpage or a subdirectory in sivasothi.com
3. Staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~sivasothi/ (aka sivasothi.com) – shift to external host
4. Mangrove.nus.edu.sg – subdirectory in sivasothi.com
5. Chekjawa.nus.edu.sg – subdirectory in sivasothi.com
6. Habitatnews.nus.edu.sg
   • blog content to blog.nus.edu.sg or wordpress
   • html pages to subdirectory in sivasothi.com
7. Otter.nus.edu.sg – http://blog.nus.edu.sg/sgotters/ (is setup, just populate)

It is going to be tough, so I imagine I’ll go slow and steady:

1. Update my local backups to be ready for transfer (mostly done).
2. Find out about domain mapping to new host.
3. Minor housekeeping to see what can be archived as pdfs into an indexed Dropbox folder.
4. Shift the html pages, especially the guidebooks, magazines and bibliographies to the new sivasothi.com server.
5. Shifting the Habitatnews (2003-2016) blog posts will be tough and will have to queue with Raffles Museum News II (2004–2007) project. Defunct image hosting servers like Skitch caused the most trouble,sigh!

I will try to get some help, and have some fun with this. There is still lots of precious information in there.

It was inevitable this day would come and it has happened later rather than sooner – thanks to the Faculty of Science, and especially Keith Phua, for 18 years of internet freedom!

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