At last, the move to the new host is complete!
I’m now hosting with Bytemark, a well-known hosting company based in York with data centres in Manchester and London. The domain is managed by 123-Reg – I’ve decided to keep the domain and hosting separate to make any future host changes easier.
The hosting package is quite different to the package I had previously. Whereas before I had a simple virtual host setup with FTP, email and databases, this package offers SSH access to a complete virtual machine running Debian. In other words, I can configure everything on the server essentially as I wish – even changing to a different Linux distro if I wanted to.
I’ll be sticking with Debian for now. It brings with it Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5, and I have the ability to add things like FastCGI should I wish to at a later date. I’ve also been able to install every optional Perl module that Movable Type can use, including ones like Image::Magick and XML::Parser which require compiled code.
I’m still using Movable Type 4.3x for now – it’s still supported, with version 4.34 having come out a few days ago, and having tried MT5 for a bit I think it’s a bit overkill for what I need it for.
The move to the new host wasn’t quite as smooth as I’d hoped – some issues with having the domain released from the old host, for example, and the new machine that the site runs on had a disk failure last night, literally about 30 minutes after I updated the DNS to point to the new server. It’s also taken some time to get used to configuring the server myself, rather than having a fancy-pants admin interface to do it for me. Suffice to say I’ve learnt a lot about the Unix command line over the past couple of weeks.
Hopefully now everything will work, but give me a heads-up if it doesn’t!
