bytemark

Hello from a new host

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Screenshot of the home page of the HostingUK web site

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.

Hello from the new server!

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A screenshot of the web site for Bytemark's BigV platform

I apologise for not posting anything for the past few days, but I’ve been waiting for the DNS on the domain to switch over to a new IP address. It should have happened on Saturday but it was actually the early hours of yesterday morning before it took effect, and in the meantime the new server was running an image taken from the old server on Saturday. So that the old server and new server were not out of sync, I decided to wait a little while – and besides, this week has been very busy for me at work.

So that’s the apology out of the way, now on to good things!

I’m still hosting my site with Bytemark, but I’ve moved to their new BigV platform. Mainly because they’re phasing out their older Virtual Machine platform but also because BigV offers more for less.

I was paying £15 per month (plus VAT) for the old virtual machine, which got me 500 MB RAM and 10 GB of storage on standard magnetic disks (plus 50 GB backup space). The new BigV virtual machine has double the RAM (1 GB) and 25 GB of storage on a solid state drive, although no extra backup space. But it’s only £10 per month plus VAT, so it’s a third cheaper. And because there’s more RAM and it’s running on solid state drives, it should be much faster.

Of course, I should really have left the upgrade until Monday, rather than doing it on a Saturday night when there was no-one at Bytemark to help me when it went wrong, but we’ve sorted the issues out now. And Bytemark did provide detailed instructions for moving across.

Next, I’m looking to install a proper SSL certificate on here. But for now, back to your erratically scheduled blogging.

Up and running again!

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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!

New host

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I have just ordered a new hosting package with a different hosting company. The package offers faster and more up-to-date servers for around £5 extra per month.

The switch will take place shortly, and will allow me to upgrade to the new Movable Type 5.01 which has just been released. MT5 requires MySQL 5.0 (released several years ago) yet my current host is still offering MySQL 4.1, as well as a very old version of Apache. There’s also no support for persistent environments such as FastCGI which are key for getting the best performance out of Movable Type.

I’m aiming to have the migration to the new host complete by the 14th, which will be the 8th anniversary of the first post to this blog.