I arrived in Australia and had a little shindig with friends I know in Sydney. The hospitality of the Krasnowskis knows no limits, so Jon, Rob, Sean and Dai all had a great evening out topped off by attempts to play coherent 12 string guitar in Jon’s back garden. I needed that and felt refreshed enough to make the train journey to Bellingen the next day.

Bellingen is a gorgeous town almost half way between Sydney and Brisbane, a good 8 hours on the train and a mere pin prick on the map of Australia.

Bellingen has a river that you can throw yourself in when the weather gets too hot and people do. It is surrounded by the kind of green and pleasant lands that made people call this place ‘New South Wales’, it looks a little like South Wales in all of it’s greenery and floods regularly to keep it that way.

Having spent my savings journeying through South America it was time to work however, so I set about making a giant website to list all of the dwellings in the British Isles. I made this site partly as a way to appease my homesickness, somehow it keeps me in connection with my home, it will be a resource to allow people to chat about where they live, what’s going on and compare living standards. I hope it’s a success.

My problem with having built a website of over 21000 pages was hosting. My original hosting wouldn’t even allow me to load the back end, so I had to look around for something cheap but powerful until that could grow with my site.

My search ended up with Amazon’s cloud hosting, EC2 hosting to be exact backed up by an EBS volume. I’ll itemise exactly how I built my server and configured it to handle my site in my next post.