I’ve been spending most of today upgrading various bits and pieces on my external server. Since March 2007 I’ve had a dedicated server at Layered Technologies in the US. However with the change in the value of the dollar, a price rise they had a while back the cost has gone from around $NZ 100 to $NZ 200 ( $US 105 ) per month (with me paying a larger percentage of it) which is just a little too much for what I need.
So a couple of weeks ago I bought a $US 40/month VPS at Linode.com to replace it ( switch off of the old machine is the end of January ). So far I’ve been pretty happy, the box was provisioned in a few minutes, I got an extra IP no problem and it came with a nice minimal Ubuntu 7.10 install.
Today I’ve been moving over a few more service to the new machine and documenting it as I go.I’m also trying to get the config a little tidier than the previous one
- DNS was pretty easy and I’ve tidied up my domains ( all 10 ) . I’m just waiting for people I secondary DNS for to make some changes before starting cut overs.
- Some websites are move. The static sites ( like my homepage ) were easy and the wordpress ones were as well ( dump DB, scp , import DB ).
- I upgraded WordPress to 2.7 while I was at it which seems to have worked okay. Only thing I don’t like is the small fonts on the admin pages.But there is probably a way to fix that.
- I had a few problems moving over one web-app since it was keeping old info somewhere (I checked the DB and the configs) but as luck would have it Ubuntu has recently fixed the package to work with non-apache Web installs (I am using lighttpd) so I just blew away the DB, grabbed a clean install and took 20 minutes to re-add the small amount of data.
- Wiki sites are still to be moved and I’ve left off a couple of that are probably getting moved elsewhere.
- I got the basic backups working also just in case something goes kaput.
Overall it’s been a fun day. I would hope I’ll be able to finish the rest of the move by the end of next weekend.
