As of Monday, I’m hosting this blog with a new hosting company: HostingUK. Previously, I’ve been with Bytemark, having migrated there almost 15 years ago. And, for almost ten years, this blog has been on Bytemark’s BigV platform.
Bytemark announced that its BigV platform was being retired, as it’s reaching the end of its operational life, and offered to transfer me to HostingUK. They’re both now owned by the same parent company, IOMart. Price-wise, I’m still paying the same amount per month for a very similar package as before.
Hopefully, you won’t have noticed any issues with the changeover. It seemed to go really smoothly from my end – I’ve had far more issues in the past, but then I was significantly more prepared this time
On the new host, I’ve built a new virtual machine, rather than simply copying the entire image over. It’s still based on Debian Linux, with Sympl providing the hosting environment. Sympl, incidentally, is forked from Bytemark’s own Symbiosis project which is no longer in development.
I then copied over the data from the old image to the new one – both the data files and a dump of the MariaDB database. Then all I had to do was wait for the DNS to switch over. Indeed, it felt like an anti-climax – apart from renewing some login tokens and some DNS tweaks, I’ve not needed to do much tinkering following the switchover.
