New Year, New Server at Mythic Beasts

Just a short post today to let you know that RasPi.TV has just completed server migration to a new server at Mythic Beasts.

Why move?

I found out on New Year’s Day that my existing server hosting company was moving from London to Reading. So at the end of January they were going to physically move the rack, containing my server, to Reading. This meant that, while it was in transit, all five web sites I have on this machine, and all my email, would be offline.

This was estimated to be ~8 hours. But things often take longer than they should. This is totally unacceptable to me, so I decided it was time to “review my position”. I’d been with my existing provider about 6 years and the current server just about coped with my peak 2013 day in November (just under 12k page views at the height of the HDMIPi KickStarter campaign).

It was also running Ubuntu Lucid, for which Long Term Support runs out soon – so an OS upgrade was due soon anyway. It made good sense just to move right now, this minute – even though I’m already too busy (don’t get me started about my dead laptop).

Where to move to?

So I asked around on Twitter, examined a few options, and then @ukscone suggested Mythic Beasts @Mythic_Beasts who host the Raspberry Pi web site. Considering…

• I’ve spent a lot of time on that site
• It gets an enormous amount of traffic
• Very rarely has it had any serious issues
• Liz speaks very highly of them
• They’re in the UK, which is where I want my host to be

…they ‘ticked all my boxes’. So, after exchanging a couple of tweets with them, I wrote a long email explaining who I was, what I have now, what I’m paying and what my traffic and bandwidth usage is. I asked for suggestions bearing in mind likely future activities etc.

Later that evening (New Year’s Day) I got a long email back from Pete with some suggested possibilities. We spoke the next day, decided we were a good fit for each other, and I signed up. Within a few hours, Liam had created a package for me and I started migrating sites.

A few gaps in my knowledge

I had a few small ‘knowledge gap’ hiccups along the way, but Brett and the other technical support guys have been absolutely fantastic. I’m not new to this, having been running web servers since about 1998, but I certainly don’t know everything.

I’ve never migrated a completely working system before (there’s more to it than just copying a few html files from one directory to another).

It’s really nice to have responsive, professional support (this was part of the package I’ve opted for) for what I consider to be a very fair price.

I’ve now, cautiously and carefully, managed to migrate all five sites (in as many days) to the new server, and just today switched over this one, RasPi.TV – the largest and most popular. I also upgraded everything to the latest versions, while I was at it. I also found out some new tricks about server testing, local host files etc. which will stand me in good stead for testing new stuff without risking the live site in future.

Let me know if anything odd happens

So, please let me know if you spot anything weird happening on RasPi.TV. I’ve checked things out and they seem OK to me. But leave a comment if anything’s awry.

And if you’re looking for a new web hosting provider, hop on over to Mythic Beasts and see if any of their packages is a good fit for you. I’ve only been here a short time, but it’s looking very good so far.