Back to the Future: From Cincinnati Bell to GoDaddy to VPN to Cincinnati Bell again

During the summer of 1999, I worked for a large manufacturing publisher here in Cincinnati. When my older son was born, I was able to work from home and extend my maternity leave. I had a nice work area in my dining room and a fast computer, printer, desktop scanner, and a rock-solid modem. All that I lacked was a high-speed internet connection. When Zoomtown DSL service became available for my subdivision that fall, we quickly had it installed. It was high-speed copper line Internet. In other words, this was Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) wrapped in modern DSL. Everything was plugged into a socket, and there was no “wi-fi” nor did we have websites. This new Internet service was going to transform my small book-distribution company into a going concern.

Fast-forward to 2016. My side hustle had grown into a thriving business with several websites. Cincinnati Bell came through the neighborhood and offered Fioptics, and our subdivision would have an ultra-high speed glass line run to each home. This was called Fiber-to-the-Home, or FTTH. We declined, however, as CB didn’t offer a static IP address, which was necessary for our business. Also, we found it hard to give up our landline, which was still functional in the event of a power outage. Fioptics was not.

In the meantime, we moved our dozen websites to GoDaddy after Apple discontinued its server platform. As an added benefit, when the Cincinnati Bell network went down, our websites were still up.

In 2019, Cincinnati Bell notified us that they were going to finally cut our copper wires. We were the last home in the subdivision to have glass installed. (By that time CB could accommodate a static IP address.) We quickly became accustomed to the lightning-fast speed of our FTTH connection for our home and the reliability of the GoDaddy platform with its static IP address and email. Cincinnati Bell also became known as AltaFiber.

In October 2022, GoDaddy began migrating its email to Microsoft 365, so we began exploring other providers as the cost would greatly increase. That platform was a virtual private network (VPN) hosted in the US Virgin Islands. On January 1, 2023, we moved our website hosting from GoDaddy to the VPN.

On the morning of Saturday, January 14, the VPN crashed and our websites plus our company email went dark. We spent hours online with their tech support to no avail but we still had working home Internet and email through AltaFiber. On Sunday afternoon we were still offline, but we connected with AltaFiber in an online chat. A technician would come on January 17 to configure our CB-supplied router with a static IP address so we could continue hosting our own websites. The VPN charged us $80 for a year of Static IP address service, but it had failed. We would use AltaFiber’s Static IP address “bolt-on” service for $30 each month.

The technician came as promised on Tuesday afternoon and worked for four-and-a-half hours to configure our router with the AltaFiber system. He spent a long time on the phone with HQ, as a co-worker at the office near our home had not previously configured our ip address as was the intended plan. We had also wanted the connection from the router to our new Mac Mini server to be wireless; however, a Category 6 ethernet cable was used to make the connection. Using a cable provided an advantage in that we could save the wi-fi to run our in-office webservers.

Though we are not using our VPN for its intended purpose, we are using it for our in-office network. We have a little pureVPN icon on our laptops to connect to the VPN system, so we can view our own websites away from the AltaFiber network on our own wi-fi connection.

We are still using MaraDNS to give our domain name to the outside world. Puck is still our backup. We use lighttpd as it is similar to the old Apache web server. Maddy is our email mail service that handles both SMTP and IMAP.

Those twenty-odd years ago I never would have dreamed that we’d have more than a dozen websites, including SmallBizMac. A high-baud modem running on POTS was the best of that era. Now we are using a static IP address running on fiber via an ethernet cable so we can keep our outside network on the outside and keep our inside network running wirelessly in the office.

Below is a photo showing a Category 6 ethernet cable running from the CB-supplied router to our Mac Mini server.

Our VPN was up for about two weeks and then it failed. We are now going with Cincinnati Bell/altafiber Static IP address.

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Self-hosting an internet presence

For about 15 years, we hosted our own web and email presences on a Mac server in our office, using the Mac OS X Server platform (first a specific OS version, later an app) to handle the hosting and the configuration. Apple began deprecating Mac OS Server in 2018, and discontinued it altogether last year.

That's a shame. Mac OS X Server was a terrific platform and an ideal tool for small Mac-based businesses. With a little investment of time and learning, businesses could have a robust web presence and save on hosting fees. That was always our rationale.

When Apple announced the phase-out of the server platform in 2018, we reluctantly opted to move to a commercial hosting platform. Cheap-Domain Registration, a GoDaddy reseller, has been our domain registrar for 20 years. We decided to purchase a hosting and email package from them, and it worked reasonably well at a reasonable price.

Until now.

GoDaddy recently announced that they would be migrating their entire email platform to Microsoft 365, without any input from their customers. This was not an opt-in process--the email was simply moved with five business days' notice, and a three-month "trial" period to adjust was provided. After that, email, which had previously been included with their service, would become a separate subscription feature that would amount to a significant cost increase.

The cost increase--along with the heavy-handed way the migration was implemented--was too much. So we decided to go back to our roots and begin self-hosting again.

We wanted to share a bit about the toolset we've chosen for hosting. Because Apple no longer provides simple configuration tools for web and email hosting, we assembled our own packages, and created simple interfaces for their daily use.

Our criteria for choosing web, email, and DNS programs was simple: small, lightweight, easy-to-configure programs. And for service providers, we opted for simple and cost-effective.

For the Internet backbone and static IP, we decided to host behind a Virtual Private Network with a dedicated IP address. PureVPN fits the bill nicely, with an inexpensive annual fee, support for static IP's and port forwarding--one of the only services we found that offers this. Fortunately, the Mac Mini that we purchased to use as our server machine supports automatic VPN connection, so that integrates well. We run a periodic script on the Mac Mini to ensure the VPN connection is always on.

For DNS, we found MaraDNS, a simple, robust DNS server. It builds from source code with a single command, and its core configuration is contained in a single file, plus individual entries for each domain we host. We have set MaraDNS up as the authoritative DNS server for our domains, for greater control, and use Puck as a backup external DNS server. This setup has worked very well and we have had very little DNS downtime.

For web, we are using lighttpd, a fast and light web server. lighttpd is similar to the venerable Apache web server that comes bundled with macOS, but is somewhat smaller in its options and is simpler to configure. Our needs are modest--mostly static HTML pages with some CGI--and so lighttpd is more than sufficient.

For email, we have found a very pleasant discovery--Maddy. Maddy is an all-in-one mail server, meaning it handles both sending email (SMTP) and receiving and storing messages (IMAP). We had run into considerable difficulty trying to build other commonly-used mail servers such as opensmtpd for outgoing and tpop3d for incoming and storage--various errors prevented building or smooth operation, and there did not seem to be any pending fixes. Maddy, however, built from the get-go and worked almost out of the box with very simple configuration. The one complexity was linking Maddy to an external mail server to avoid the modern difficulties that come with self-hosting a mail server. We use sendinblue for our exteral relaying; this service has a generous 300-email-per-day threshold for its free/basic package. After a fair amount of trial and error and even open tickets with sendinblue, our configuration was successful and email now works fine.

macOS does include under-the-hood support for email, web, and DNS--that has not changed. But these are much more difficult to configure without the nice GUI that Mac OS Server provided. Additionally, we were concerned that OS updates would require extensive re-configuration of each of these tools in our OS. The server app largely handled that for us, but we have less confidence that this would go smoothly with manual configuration. The setup we have assembled can function independently of the OS version. The migration project took about six weeks of part-time work, and we are not eager to re-do all this work simply because Apple ships a new Mac OS version.

Shortly, we will be terminating our hosting and email services with GoDaddy, leaving them just as our domain registrar. This forced migration to Microsoft's email platform is costing them most of our business.

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