atc 

I’ve been very busy these last few weeks. The majority of my time has been migrating this site to a new server, provided by slicehost.com (more on them later). My old host had reached its limits, both in its physical-capabilities and my patience with it. In this post i’m going to discuss the migration from old to new, and the excellent hosting packages slicehost.com has to offer.

Migration

To move from my old host, a VPS solution running on UML, requried moving two sites – beplacid.com (now beplacid.net) and forallthewrongreasons.co.uk.

Both sites were using Apache 1.3, PHP4, Python 2.4 and MySQL 5. As well as those applications, beplacid.com was using WordPress and Mediawiki which were installed manually. My first requirement was to have these packages administered by apt, and not by myself; manual installation and administration of webapps can be an added pain. Especially if you’re not hot on the security vulnerabilities.

MySQL Data Migration

This was relatively simple, as I had daily exports of all databases. It was simply a matter of ‘apt-get install mysql-server’ on the new host, then ‘mysql -u root -p -h localhost < extract.sql’ and I had my databases back up and running on the host. There were some application-specific changes needed, namely the hostname settings etc, but these were all configurable within the individual applications.

Apache 1.3 to Apache 2

I had been running Apache 1.3 for over a year. It has served me well, and i’d never think twice when considering what HTTP server to use. That said, I thought it’d be a good time to bring myself into modern times by upgrading to Apache 2.

I was originally reluctant to do so at first because of the (assumed) differences in configuration. Thankfully this was not the case, and once i’d had my DNS servers setup (thanks to Slicehost and their excellent bespoke account management software, I can do this all myself), I had the main domain and sub-domains setup.

Another reason for upgrading to Apache 2 was the need for a bandwidth control module. Mod_Cband allows you to control the remote speeds, maximum bandwidth usage per period, and many many more. I needed this to control the usage of downloads from el.beplacid.net, which is the brunt of my bandwidth usage.

All in all, a rather painless experience.

Upgraded VPS – Slicehost.com

Slicehost was recommend by a friend, Alex Smith. My previous VPS solution was a UML based Linux server running Debian. Though the host itself was adequate, I had recently suffered downtime due to what I can only guess, were issues with the 2.6 series kernels and UML. Not only that, the servers offered by Slicehost are not only running on better hardware, but have much better prices.

The first thing that struck me about slicehost was the basic but well written website. It’s informative from the start, so it’s not hard to start liking them. I was further enticed to buy when I read the hardware specs:

• 2 AMD Opteron (?) 64Bit dual-core processors
• 1GB of RAM
• 40GB of hard disk space

As an addendum, the specs of my VPS beat the machine i’m currently writing on. Not much perhaps, but slightly ironic…

Another point to mention is the community aspect of slicehost. They provide a blog, wiki (mainly for customers to use when debugging issues with their slices), and their IRC channel #slicehost on irc.freenode.net. It’s great to talk to other ‘slicers’ when you’re bored and more importantly to get quick answers when you need to (and indeed provide assistance to others).

My only gripes are not being able to pay via PayPal (I don’t use credit cards) and there being no option for unlimited bandwidth – something which I liked about my previous host.

So, here we are. A new server and potentially new things to serve. Overall a very pleasing migration and a very satisfied customer. Cheers Slicehost!