The other day I was talking to Kevin, and he encouraged me to host the blog myself.  Initially when I started this blog, I used MSN spaces because it was free and there were really no hurdles to jump in order to get my thoughts out.  After running into problems using spaces, I decided it was time for dasBlog!

The whole process was really quite simple and I got the site up and running in only an hour or so.  Basically, I headed over to EasyDNS and registered JasonEngstrom.com and set them up as my DNS host.  This was probably the most time consuming part of the whole process, since I was trying to decide what domain name to use, and there are several I was considering that were already taken (www.theengstroms.com, www.engstroms.com, www.engstroms.net).  I finally decided I might as well grab my name since it was available.  So, for a year's use of the name and DNS hosting, it was $35.  Subsequently, I picked up www.theengstroms.net for $2 at Yahoo. 

Since I don't have a static IP, EasyDNS has a nice option for dynamic IP's using a program called DynSite.  We'll see if this gives me any problems, but for the time being it seems to be working fine.

Finally, I installed dasBlog and with some minor tweaking, I had it serving my site locally.  The small snag I did run into was opening up port 80 on my box.  I couldn't view the site from the outside world, and had to do some digging until I remembered SP2's Windows Firewall service.  My router was properly forwarding port 80 to my webserver, but I completely forgot to open up the port via Windows Firewall.  The good news is Windows Firewall seemed to do the job in blocking the port!  Once I opened it up, though, it was all good.

Finally, there is some minor configuration needed for dasBlog, but it can really be done in about 5 minutes.  I'm still figuring out some the finer details, so you might see some cosmetic changes (for example, I like the Sound Waves theme I'm using, but for the life of me I don't see a way to edit/delete entries using this theme.  It may go away!) 

Anyway, just wanted to encourage anyone out there that may be sitting on the fence deciding whether or not to host a blog themselves...its easy!  Give it a shot.