Personal Dork Assistant

Move Moving On

Moved the site to the new host and I bet you didn't even notice.

The 1and1.com free web-hosting deal was a great way to get into running my own domain. But all good things must come to an end and I started to receive ominous emails regarding the impending end of the three freebie years. To be honest 1and1 offered very compelling and inexpensive upgrade options. I could even keep the current package for only $3.99 per month. The current package allows SSH access, but only had 500 megabytes in disk quota, and new packages offered much more disk space, but don't offer SSH access until you get to the $10/month level.

Now, I've been doing Unix on the command-line since the SparcStation days and I wasn't about to give that up. So it was time to troll through WebHostingTalk and see what I can find. Almost went with Dreamhost and their too-good-to-be-true offer, but there were too many scary reviews of oversold servers and unresponsive service. Plus $7.95 per month just wasn't quite cheap enough for a crappy little blog site. Finally found Site5 which offered everything I was looking for at five bucks per month. Of course the disk and bandwidth quotas were wildly over-exaggerated and oversold, but for five a month I was willing to be the under-utilizing schmuck who subsidizes the heavy-duty leeches.

Had to wait a day and send them an email to get the account provisioned since I was ordering from China, which must've appeared a bit suspicious. But once I had the account, it was trivial to tar-gzip up the entire site on 1and1 and squirt it over to the new host via the CLI. The Movable Type database transfer was a bit trickier since I had to first create an empty database at site5 and edit the 1and1 export file to make it use the pre-made shell database instead of CREATE-ing its own in order to get around permission issues. Also took a few tries before I realized I had to import the file as Binary instead of UTF-8 to keep all my precious Chinese characters from being mangled in the process.

Finally, it was just a matter of changing the DNS server pointer at the domain registrar and the new PersonalDork (same as the old PersonalDork) was open for business. Before I could blink spam mail was already trickling into the new mail server. Ah, good to be home.