Some months ago, I got an email from my server provider Hetzner, telling me that I have to migrate my server to a new system. When I started with this entire server hosting as a student, I had loads of time and interest in these things, but nowadays, I just want something that is working. I do not want to care about exploding mail standards, Debian upgrades, server migrations, ever evolving security rules, backups and so on. So I took this opportunity to shut down my main server entirely and move to some proper cloud services. This posts illustrates the choices and the pros and cons compared to my old, self-hosted solution.

This is my personal answer to the call for Rust 2019 Roadmap blog posts. To make it easier to read, I’ve separated the post into sections by topic.

Democracy — the great promise of freedom, sanity and happiness that westerns leaders made. It is the way we organize states, federations, unions, communities, forums, families, universities and nearly every organization where humans need to come along. We assume that it is the status quo of living together. The problem is, it is — at least in its current form — doomed to fail, and I will explain you why I think so.

Nearly every service, app, website or provider we use records a bunch of data about us, for good and bad reasons. Not all of them enable you to use that data, but some of them make it pretty easy. This is my attempt to get an entertaining (and not to serious) picture of my motion profile that Google recorded for 2016.

Setting up your own email server sounds like a good idea when you are into privacy or when your boss asks you to do so. What sounds like an easy afternoon project quickly turns into a mess, even when you only have very few (or only one) mail account to manage. After trial-and-erroring for a long time, I want to give an overview over all involved technologies and possible stumbling blocks. This is not intended to be a tutorial, for various reason. a) your setup might be totally different and b) most server setup guides make admins copying around config files they do not really understand. This post is also somewhat written in a way that you can pick and read only parts of it in an order you like. Furthermore, I assume that you are familiar with basic technical terms. And finally, a small note on wording: I use Transport Layer Security (TLS) instead of the outdated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) abbreviation, with the exception when it is part of other names or configuration variables.