And so my websites have moved again, although it is five years since I last went through this.
I am amused by what I typed then:
I’m in the midst of changing the provider of my Virtual Private Server from Webfusion to Tagadab. This is mainly due to Webfusion being sensationally unhelpful in advising me on how to migrate my VPS (hosting several websites) away from the old server, running software past end-of-life. Their answer was that I should simply open a new VPS account with them, and keep both old and new accounts open while I stumbled through the migration without assistance.
Because five years later, that is exactly what I went through again with Tagadab. No interest in helping me bring my old VPS up to date, they would rather I dump it and start again. With them, still, of course.
I almost walked again. But then a helpful support guy came up with an option to move from a VPS to their Cloud Solution
- It is virtually the same with regard to how the sites are maintained; I don’t have to learn new tools.
- It is more flexible – if I want a bit more diskspace, I can just pay for it, and not have to upgrade to the next package.
- It is also cheaper, by about 9 quid a month, for the same (or better) package components.
The one drawback is that it is limited to 50Gb a month, but my websites should easily stay under that, having recently reviewed my bandwidth. Even if I did go over, it is 0.02/Gb for more. So I would need to be going over my allocation by 450Gb to negate my monthly saving.
I think I can live with that!
This time I used a migration tool to move the domains from Plesk on the VPS to Plesk on the cloud. It didn’t do everything for me, but it made life a lot simpler.
I have a couple of outstanding issues. My board-game group’s forum is currently down because it is just too old to run on the new server. That’s down to me, and I will be bringing in a new design soon. Thankfully, due to the lockdown, it was not seeing much use.
The other issue is the php files that form a kind of backend for most of my Alexa skills refuse to run. Not even phpinfo.php, which is the basic test script. I’ve handed that to support to look at.
But all in all a good day’s work.
Pleased to find that my new server comes with SNI support, which allows for multiple domains to each have their own certificate without the need of putting them on different IP addresses.
This is not particularly new, but the lack of it on the old server was a bone of contention.
This means I no longer need to pay for multiple IP addresses, which saves me about 5 quid a month.
But the hosting company giveth, and the hosting company taketh away. It turns out the version of Plesk (domain/website management suite) on the new server is the cut-down version without support for “Customers” (which I had before). This means the couple of friends I host for might not get their own Plesk panels for *just* their domains.
There are other ways to give them access, but what annoys me is when the same tool has various versions, with different levels of functionality, but they just vaguely refer to them all (in conversation and web blurb) as “Plesk”, I wasted a couple of hours today looking for functionality that wasn’t there, simply because I had never come across a version of Plesk *without* the Customers concept.