I first started tinkering with websites in 2000, a few years later in 2004 I started producing professional websites. Whilst I was producing websites, I quickly learned that a lot of the things I needed to do, required the servers to have some additional scripts installed, or a few things tweaked. It was this that led me into the world of servers.
During this period I was still at University and remained there for a further few years, but only part time. Whilst at University, I studied a range of courses covering such things as; BSC degree in web design, applied mathematics, web server management, server performance and tuning, vandalism in cyberspace, to name but a few. I began to like University so much that I then went on to start my degree in quantum physics and a degree in astrophysics.
By 2007 I was managing and performing server tweaks for a small bank of servers, and by 2010 I was a senior server engineer for a small datacenter. Over the next two years I had emails from a number of clients stating they found a tutorial online and had tried it but their servers had now frozen up and nothing was working. I was also volunteering at a few tech support websites and having members come across the same issues, where they had tried something they had found in a tutorial but it hadn't worked or had broken their server.
It was then that I decided to produce my first book which was released in May 2013, 'How to Build a Home or Office Web Server'. My intention was to provide a quick guide to allow you to turn an old PC into a high powered Web Server. This way you could create a number of virtual private servers at no extra cost, house your website on one, and have another for testing your server tweaks before committing them to your main server.
I never intended to be an author but my book had received great feedback and people had asked if I could explain a little more or could I cover other aspects. I had produced this website to accompany the book for anyone that wanted to ask questions and with the great feedback and the similar questions cropping up, I decided to write the 2nd addition to my book, 'How to Build a Home or Office Web Server 2nd Edition'. This book is due to be released in June 2015 and will be a more in-depth view into building and managing a web server.
My first book is a very graphical step by step guide, where as the 2nd edition won't have this aspect, it will still be a step by step guide, but a little more in depth and covering a lot more subjects such as Raid Configuration, Replacing a Raid Hard Drive, Server Security, FTP Servers and creating automatic backups of your websites.