This site was originally deployed on the servers hosted by West Point in the mid 90s. Here's a link to the original site as it appeared on the West Point Alumni site. The service West Point provided was great, and reliable for years - but I became frustrated that I couldn't run database applications or use Java to make the site more interactive. Their service only allowed HTML and some CGI. So in 2001 I set out to build a site on my own server.
First, I needed a server, so I bought a computer loaded with Windows 2000 - chosen mostly because it's what I used at work. The site went through several iterations and several home servers. I registered calandva.com through Network Solutions.
To monitor uptime I signed up with WebSitePulse. Even on their free tier, I'd get an email whenever the site went down, and again when it came back - polling every hour, with availability stats on their site. More robust monitoring is available for a small fee, but the free tier did the job.
Now that we were on the web, I needed to actually build a site. I took the original HTML frame-based site and rewrote it on Java/JSP, frame-free, using a stack built mostly on open source technology from the Jakarta project. I chose Tomcat as the application server, initially standalone with no separate web server. Once I started hosting several sites, I turned back to Jakarta for the Apache Web Server in front of it.
For the application framework, I leaned on what I was learning on the job. My development manager at the time, Steve Melzer, was a proponent of Struts - a good fit since I wanted something JSP-based, and I was learning the technology on our production systems anyway. Struts is a Model-View-Controller framework for JSP applications that speeds development considerably; the community had already done the hard work of building the infrastructure.
For a database, I turned to another open source product, MySQL - it made it easy to copy databases from my development workstation to the "production" server at home.
After more than 20 years of hosting from home, Cox decided to block port 80, which took every site down. I moved everything to AWS - three months to rewrite all the sites for the cloud. The hardest part was testing locally what would actually behave correctly once deployed. Life got a lot simpler after that, for both of us.
AWS limited support for MySQL, so I moved the operating system to Ubuntu and the database to PostgreSQL. Database management got a bit harder, but it's a solid technology to build on.
I began rewriting the site for current versions of Java, which meant leaving my old friend Struts behind. The site today runs on Spring, Hibernate, Struts2, and Freemarker, with Bootstrap on the front end.