I have learned a lot on developing my website, about .NET, ASP.NET, Web Design, Servers, Database etc., it’s been a good platform to learn the new technologies and implement them. I have played and been playing many roles in its development, here are them:

Web Designer
Being a creative person, I’ve always liked web designing, graphics, animation etc. This pushed me to create my first version of my website (HTML based), spent a lot of time on it and at the same time learned (self-learned) a lot on designing, good and bad techniques :). When I started working closely with a designer in HHS, learned many good practices on HTML Designing from her. It eventually pushed me to redesign my website. Though I acquired decent designing skills, I didn’t spend much time on designing as I wanted it to be simple and neat. I just followed the good practices on designing, this made my site look consistent in most of the browsers, in different resolutions, colors, point sizes etc.

Network Administrator
Before setting up my site I just had a minimal knowledge on networking - to just share folders, open firewall/router ports, setup static ip etc. But, after setting up my site or in the process of setting up my site I learned a lot about networking technologies/methodologies like Virtualization, Domain Controllers, Backup Strategies, Re-routing Network Traffic, Security, Access Control etc. Initially, I had my site hosted on Godaddy’s Servers, and later on built my own servers and deployed everything on my servers. It was definitely worth spending extra bucks in building my own server and taking business connection (as I my ISP blocked port 80 for residential connections). Its advantages – installed softwares as I wished, and upgraded them as and when updates were released, opened ports in the firewall, changed security settings as per my needs, and many more. My responsibilities as a network admin:-
1. Instead of buying a  server machine, I just converted my desktop to a server by installing server 2003 r2, and added RAM (had 4 GB RAM, added another 4 GB) and hard drives (bought another hard drive for backup).
2. Thought Virtualization will serve me better in terms of security, availability, usage etc. So, I used VMWare Server to setup virtualized servers. Built a virtualized server in my main server machine (server 2003 r2), and another virtualized server in my personal computer (windows 7), thus got 3 servers (windows 2003 r2). Setup my server machine as the domain controller (just for reference, I’ll name it as “A”), the virtual machine in it as the web/ftp/file/shoutcast/sql servers (name - “B”), and the virtual machine in my PC as the backup server (or testing machine), clone of B (name - “C”). Just before major software updates or changes in the network settings or any other changes that was supposed to affect the web traffic in B, I rerouted my network traffic to C.
3. Synchronization Strategy – Synchronized servers B and C using SyncToy (for folders) and Backup/Restore feature in SQL Server (for database). I will explain this in detail in my next blog.
4. Backup Strategy – Scheduled nightly backup of windows folders, SQL server and few other settings, and monthly backup of virtual machines (manually copied virtual machine files) to a hard drive dedicated for backups.
5. At least at the time of writing this blog, I didn’t have anything to do with ASP.NET Sessions, so rerouting the web traffic was not a big deal – just opening and closing ports in my router took care of it. However, as I didn’t have a proper way to reroute my radio traffic, I just played some pre-recorded announcements saying “Server is going to be restarted, it will be back in X minutes” or “Server is unavailable due to maintenance, it will be back in few minutes (or hours)”
6. Domain Management – I added and modified @ and CNAME records, changed name servers etc.

Database Administrator/Developer
Godaddy’s ASP.NET Hosting was good (not great though), but their Database Hosting was ridiculous. They had an ASP.NET based interface, just to execute db scripts… running DDL scripts was not a problem; however, executing DML  or importing data was not easy. So, decided to host my SQL Server Database in a different place, and only when I found that Godaddy blocked remote SQL Server access. All these limitations and the price factor pushed me to setup my own database server. My responsibilities as a database administrator or developer:
1. I’ve never liked writing dynamic or inline queries in the frontend, so always followed stored procedure approach. Performed most of the database operations using stored procedures. Once I started using LINQtoSQL and Entity Framework, the usage of stored procedures got reduced, I used them only for complex operations.  
2. Created database, user accounts, roles etc., mapped user accounts or roles to data objects appropriately.
3. Built backup (full and differential) and restore strategy, and scheduled sql server jobs to perform these operations appropriately.
4. Created and used SSIS for routine GeoIP to Location data imports from MaxMind.

Tester
I used my server “C” as a backup or a testing server. I always applied patches or installed/upgraded softwares here, and only after thorough testing, I performed the same operations in my server “B” (my main server).

Web Developer
Working as a Web Developer, I created many Web 2.0 websites at my work, and at one point I found Web Development to be interesting than Windows Development. At that point, I felt I should convert my HTML site to Web 2.0 using all the latest web technologies. With all the experiences that I gained on web development from my job, I developed my website, and based on the experiences that I gained from developing my website, I did many things at my office – my work and my website served each other well. 
I developed the first .NET version of my site using VS 2005/.NET 2.0 Framework with SQL Server 2005. Later on, upgraded to .NET Framework 3.5/VS 2008, used LINQtoSQL and other new features in VS 2008. My current version (as of Aug 15 2010), uses .NET 4.0 and SQL Server 2008.

If you need any help on building your own server, feel free to contact me.

Link to my site – http://www.gokulnath.com