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:

Create a subdomain
Upload the files
Changed the nameservers (on GoDaddy)
Made a small edit to the index.html/php file for checking purposes
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…