But hopefully you won’t notice.

I decided it was time

For a number of reasons I have been maundering about moving my webhosting and I finally made the leap. The last time I moved was back in January 2014. So it was time, right? The first move was January 2010 from a home server to GoDaddy… that was barely 4 years. Complacency must have set in.

The reasons? Well, in no particular order:

Speed

My old host was dreadfully slow sometimes and I could never figure out if it was my site design and years and years of clapping odds and sods together and shoddily attaching them to the site or just them. Moving gives me a chance to experiment with a new provider and to clean up a bunch of crud that has accumulated.

Money

2 more years of hosting on the old site was going to be $216 usd ($276 cad). Taking advantage of a “new customer” deal netted me 3 years for only $148 cad.

Canadian laws

I have become increasing disturbed by the slowly eroding privacy laws in the U.S. L had needed a Canadian-based server for her research project last fall and I did a bunch of research on Can-based hosts. Since I was moving, why not move to a Canadian company and avoid any increasingly privacy-creep that seems to be the American judicial system. And I know, it really is more symbolic that actual, but still. Oh, and it’s “buy Canada” too! So I get loyalty points.

Python

One of the things I noted when I was doing my research was that some hosting companies allowed python and ruby apps. It was a point of great frustration a few years ago that I had to host my apps on my home server. This new host allows such apps to be hosted. I probably won’t move my old ones now but any new apps can be hosted off my home site.

Downsides?

Time and effort

It took half a day of planning most of a day work to move everything and I am still not sure its been 100% successful. But I like puttering and I learned some shit so why not.

rsync

So far the only big downside is rsync doesn’t seem o work on the new host. I will have to ask when I get to that point. Rsync was what I used to deploy my hugo website automatically: syncing my desktop files to the server. I can use ftp in the mean time but just typing deploy was a great way to update things.

What do I spend this money for?

My new host! Oddly enough L’s research project is hosted here and they suffered a nigh-on-catastrophic breach this past summer. Luckily, at least for us, everything was restored pretty thoroughly. So why did I pick them? Well I figured that the security breach probably taught them a huge lesson and, at least for a while, they are going to have some pretty hot and up-to-date security in place. And all the reasons above.

And I learned a lesson about my own back-ups as well. 🙂

webhosting

I host a number of sites.
– macblaze.ca—my personal home since 2005
– neverforever.ca—our boating site
– astart.ca—my professional site
– theboozephiles.com— my, L’s, C’s and Z’s cocktail site. Check it out if you like booze!
– beakerwood.ca—my brother’s woodworking site. permanently under construction these days

And two more for C which are little more than placeholders but I keep hoping she will let me make her some spiffy sites.
– reluctantlyyours.ca
– littlefirecreative.ca

subdomains

I also use a bunch of subdomains to direct web traffic to various projects and my home server. This is an offshoot of my handy Pi Nginx project!

email

At least 4 site-specific email addresses. I have no idea why people shell out for mybusiness.com and then use mybusiness@gmail… seems a waste of resources. Most of them just forward to my existing addresses but at least one is standalone.

various projects

I have hosted api’s, static sites, otehr people’s domains etc. It gives me a lot of flexibility—and as I mentioned above I can now host python web apps.

A bit more complicated but…

So how was the move compared to last time? A bit more efficient, but also a bit more complex wth all the various sites. 3 of them were WordPress sites with associated mysql databases and structures and the other 4 were just static. So I did a massive host-wide backup and downloaded the 9-gig zip file to my desktop. I also exported the 3 mysql databases using the  backup tool.

After that I, one-by-one, starting with the smallest and easiest (beakerwood.ca), worked on a site:

1. Create a subdomain
2. Upload the files
3. Changed the nameservers (on GoDaddy)
4. Made a small edit to the index.html/php file for checking purposes
5. And waited about 10–20 minuted for the domain name to propagate through the internet

And voila!

The WordPress sites started with creating a new, empty mysql database and the using phpMyAdmin to import the files downloaded from the old server. Then it was simply a matter of zipping the dowloaded wp installation, uploading it and then extracting the files. Like last time back in 2014 I tried uploading the un zipped files first and it was excruciatingly slow. But I clued in quicker this time. You would have thought I would go back and read those notes (since that is primarily what this site is for) but no… dumb, dumb, dumb  😉

The only thing I had to do was change the wp-config.php file to use the new database name and credentials. It all worked smoothly except for macblaze.ca but eventually I got my silly errors straightened out.

add emails

Since they were mostly forwards this was simply a matter of adding new emails tot eh new host. Everything else (smtp servers etc) stayed the same.

ssh

I had a bit of trouble getting ssh to work but it was because they use a different port. A quick chat with tech support straightened me out. Now I just have to figure out the rsync thing.

C’est tout

That’s pretty much it. So far, so good. I cancelled my account at Stablehost and already got back a “please don’t go, here is 6 months free…” note, but I am committed now. We shall see…

As I have been playing with my Pi I have been introduced to a bunch of new concepts and terminologies. The first is Homelab. Apparently it is a thing to build a your won server and set it up wth some high powered stuff. If you watch the YouTube videos you get the sense that these tare might powerful systems but reading between the lines you realize that’s just because they are YouTubers and need to keep ahead of the curve. My Pi and Shaw’s router qualify just fine as a homelab. It seems all I have to be doing is installing shit, breaking shit and adding even more shit. Check.

The next one, and more relevant to this post is dashboard. After you get your home server all set up you start to realize that most fo the services are web-based and it get to be a lot of book marks for things you go back to again and again. So the idea of a custom start page was born (reddit even has one of those reddit forums thingees dedicated to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/startpages/). Taking the idea further a bunch of developers have made apps to manage the underlying code as the whole idea of a homelab is that it changes pretty often and hand-coding a new webpage every time would get monotonous.

Homer

Homer was the first dashboard I encountered and frankly, IMHO, still the best. I will look at some of the others later. Homer is a project developed by Bastien Wirtz and is available as a docker container.

Out of the box it is pretty basic and frankly ugly:

But it does come with a bunch of easy configuration options to make improvements pretty quick. And if you dig deeper you can tweak it pretty significantly. I came across walkxcode’s modded theme and immediately started stealing some of his settings to get it the way I wanted.

The config is all based on yaml (yet another markup language) which I learned for my Hugo web pages so I was already pretty familiar with the format. Adding or deleting items on the page is simply a matter of editing the config file.

items:
- name: "Awesome app"
logo: "assets/tools/sample.png"
subtitle: "Bookmark example"
tag: "app"
url: "https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/"
target: "_blank" # optional html a tag target attribute

It features colour-coded tagging, as many categories as you want 2, 4, 6 or 12 column layout, a link/menu bar, optional header and footer, additional pages and a list view. You can add in a custom background, use light or dark mode and a few cool applications like hooking up to a Open Weather api to display your local weather.

Homer does have a few major downsides. Although there is a search function it only searches the startpage. Many of the other dashboards integrate google or duck duck go searches into the search field so you can use it as your browsers’ default page. And it uses vue.js (which is Greek to me) and scss (which is more Spanish—I understand some of it, but wouldn’t dare try and speak it) so making changes is not as straightforward as I might like. Hence the borrowing of walkxcode’s work.

But all in all after I got it where I wanted to be. For now 🙂

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The Competition

If you look in the fourth column you will see Flame, Heimdall and Dashboard, which are all other dashboards you could use and I tried them all to one degree or another.

Dashboard

Dashboard (https://github.com/phntxx/dashboard) is the simplest (and I think the oldest). It works from json files which I have played with but is harder to parse than yaml and much more visually complex which makes it harder (for me) to make quick edits without screwing up the format. Other than that I didn’t like the lack of custom icons and the strict layout format.

Flame

As far as I can tell Flame (https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame) is mostly a fork of Dashboard…at least visually. It added in a web interface so you could add icons and links using a browser rather than having to edit a config file. Which put it ahead of both Dashboard and Homer, but, in the end I didn’t like the restrictions imposed on the way info was displayed and was frustrated with what kind of info you had to show.

Heimdall

The last dashboard I tried was Heimdall (https://heimdall.site/) which seems to be pretty popular and much more professional. My big issue with it (and indeed with Homer but there I could fix it) was the size of the app “buttons.” I still run a 1920 x 1080 screen and you just can’t fit many buttons onto one screen. Add in a search bar (disabled in the screen shot) and it just looked bloated. But it did have the web interface, lots of custom tags and categories and would probably look way better on a higher resolution screen.