{"id":41591,"date":"2018-01-23T01:54:29","date_gmt":"2018-01-23T06:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41591"},"modified":"2018-01-23T12:52:06","modified_gmt":"2018-01-23T17:52:06","slug":"site-move-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=41591","title":{"rendered":"Site Move"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been with Hosting Matters for almost 12 years<\/a>. For all that time, they’ve hosted the site you’re looking at right now. It’s been a good run, but the site is moving. I’ve been feeling like I need to migrate for a while now. With the recent security concerns<\/a>, now seems like a good time to pack up and move. <\/p>\n

What you need to know:<\/p>\n

Sometime on Tuesday evening on the East coast, I’m going to take a snapshot of the database. (I’ll post an update to this post just before the move.) Any comments left after that point will get left behind. After that, there will be some unknown time before the transition is done. I have to get my current host to change the DNS record to point to my new host, and companies are notoriously slow about helping people leave their service. When you see a new post at the top of this page, it will either be an announcement of a successful migration or a rant about how it all went So Very Wrong.<\/p>\n

If you’re curious, I’m moving to Dreamhost<\/a>. This is mostly due to peer pressure. Everyone I know (that runs a website) uses Dreamhost. <\/p>\n

As part of the migration, I’ve been digging around in the old file directories of the site, seeing what’s junk and what’s worth backing up. I found an old database from a work blog I ran back in 2008, and that’s a pretty interesting read. It’s amazing how little of it I remember. I also found a six-page comic from 2007 that I never published. It’s not very good, but it’s an interesting find. I’ll probably put that up on a rainy day.<\/p>\n

With any luck, I hope to have the new site working by Wednesday. And I hope it will be faster. And I hope the forums will return. And I hope the whole thing will be fun and not stressful or frustrating. And I hope to ride a magical unicorn to a world of free candy that doesn’t make you fat but tastes like it does. <\/p>\n

So yeah. High hopes. I’m sure nothing can go wrong. This is going to be so much fun<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 10am:<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I said in the comments below:<\/p>\n

The new site is loading OBNOXIOUSLY slow. Like, 6 full seconds to load the front page. And since the site is still private, I'm the only one looking at it. I shudder to think what performance would be like under normal load. At first I thought it was slow because I was doing stuff on the backend. (Like database migration.) But then everything settled down and it was still slow as hell.<\/p>\n

After some experimenting, we determined it's their SQL server that's holding things up. A friend put my dB on his server and the site loaded instantly.<\/p>\n

Worse still, I opted to go with their VPS SQL hosting. Which means I'm paying for an entire extra VM, just for running SQL. This doubles the monthly cost, but I was willing to pay it if I could have speed and stability. But after spinning up my virtual server, the site ran exactly the same.<\/p>\n

This is totally unacceptable. I sent them an email 6 hours ago, asking if they can do anything about it. Still waiting to hear back.<\/p>\n

Shame. I've blown two entire days on this migration (ugh, don't ask. It's a comedy of errors) and I'd really hate to start over with another host, but I'm not going to run this site with constant long load times. That's miserable for everyone. (Particularly, me, since moderating comments and editing posts is such a huge part of my workflow.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

UPDATE 11:30am:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I just spotted this in their help center:<\/p>\n

“DreamHost does not offer refunds for DreamPress, Dedicated server, or VPS (private server) hosting fees. The 97-day money back guarantee only applies to shared hosting plans. View the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTerms of Service' for further details.”<\/p>\n

I just purchased a whole year. I saw that big “97 day money-back guarantee!” and figured it was safe to do so. But apparently they only guarantee their cheapest, low-tier plans?<\/p>\n

Damn it. That was a lot of money. It's been 8 hours since I issued my ticket and they haven't even replied yet with a lame “We're looking into it”. If this is how they treat a new customer then I can't imagine how they'd treat me once I'd fully migrated.<\/p>\n

What a pain in the ass.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

UPDATE: NOON<\/strong><\/p>\n

Update: Canceled. Got a refund despite the disclaimer. That really took the edge off. <\/p>\n

Now I guess I need to find another prospective host. If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m open to them.<\/p>\n

I need all the usual stuff a webhost offers, like power and bandwidth at a reasonable price. I’m looking for direct FTP \/ MySQL access, not some fancy-pants “site builder” thing like SquareSpace. Also I’d really prefer to go with something established, not some place that just launched last week. And I’d prefer to have SSH access available. I’m rubbish at Linux and almost never use it, but sometimes it really is the best way to solve a problem.<\/p>\n

And for reasons of dystopian corporate paranoia, I’d rather not go with a service from giants like Google or Amazon. Although I’d do it if it was the only way to get the features I need.<\/p>\n

I was right. This is exactly as much fun as I thought it would be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been with Hosting Matters for almost 12 years. For all that time, they’ve hosted the site you’re looking at right now. It’s been a good run, but the site is moving. I’ve been feeling like I need to migrate for a while now. With the recent security concerns, now seems like a good time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41591"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41600,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41591\/revisions\/41600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}