Just a heads up to let everyone know that the site will be moving to a shiny new server over the coming weekend. I'll try to keep downtime to an absolute minimum, but it's likely that the site will be offline for at least 30 minutes. Over the weekend you may have login issues, those will likely be down to your ISP's DNS not having updated to point to the new site and so you'll still be connecting to the old server (although I'm going to add a temporary proxy so it'll still work, I hope!).

UPDATE: like any plan a few things got in the way, so the site move will be tomorrow, Monday the 6th Sept.

EDIT: move is now complete. Welcome to the new server

Ooh. Shiny servers are always good! (must resist urge to buy new hardware).

If you want anything testing over the weekend and I'm around gimme a shout

Stu

Cheers. As it is the move should hopefully be smooth, it's being moved to a similar setup as it's already running on and we've been testing stuff for two weeks The new hosting should be more reliable too - while the current server is my own and has so far been no trouble to run, the ISP has been another matter, with line drops and router issues plaguing it over the past year. The new hosting has 24/7 management (so should a hard disk die it'll be sorted out without me having to do anything , and with RAID10 even that won't kill it), and multiple connections to the data centre so unless something disastrous happens shouldn't have a connection drop.

Sounds like it's all in hand

That's the problem with a lot of the ISPs out there at the mo. You never know how good they actually are until they fall over. Look's like it's moving to a much better place.

*makes note to look into colo again as it's about time he put another box out there.

Colo is far too expensive. I was lucky for the past year, the office I was working in allowed me to host the AoS server in the office itself (which is where it still is!), so I had my own hardware. Looking around for a new location (as I no longer work at that office, and notice runs out next week) I found colo was very expensive, especially as the AoS server is a 4U box (it's a PC I had spare, a 4U case was much cheaper than a 1U a year ago and I had no idea a year later I'd be having to relocate), and even a 1U colo is expensive.

I've ended up going with a VPS with BigWetFish, read lots of good reviews of them and know a few people running VPS with them who love it, and the price is very attractive.

I'm writing this very post via a reverse proxy running on the new VPS - this will allow me to change the DNS prior to moving and anyone hitting the new server will see the current server, and when the migration is running I'll simply switch the proxying to the current server and point it at the new server. Hopefully the DNS propagation won't take more than a few days, and everything will be running fully on the new server

I'd recommend you look into VPS rather than colo, but I guess it depends on your requirements. The AoS server is also running AB40k.org, and had it not been for a few services I need access to running on the same server as the sites I could have gone for shared web hosting - however, I used to have that a few years ago and running a site with phpBB and Gallery with a bit of traffic tends to kick the account over the ridiculously low shared hosting CPU/RAM limits and next thing you know the hosting co is demanding you move your site to a dedicated server at 50x the monthly cost! A VPS is ideal for this - it gives me the flexibility of a dedicated server combined with the low cost of shared hosting, and I can let someone else deal with any hardware issues which wouldn't be the case with colo

The move is going ahead in a couple of hours - had a few teething problems moving AB40k.org over due to changes in the PHP configuration on the new server, but I think I've sorted it out now.

Site move has now been completed. If anyone notices any errors, or things that don't work as they did before, please post a reply here. Gallery might be a little slow for about 10 minutes while the cache index is updated.

Just to say..well done, I can see the site.. and I can log on..
So you must have got the basics right XD.
Will post if anything interesting pops up.

There was a bit of a panic when the database import seemed to be taking ages and then I noticed there were delays around 30 - 45 seconds per row in the gallery cache table, and with almost 1 million rows that was going to take a while ... removed the indexes and it was done in a few secs, adding the indexes back afterwards took about 10 minutes but all seems good

The gallery is still syncing at the file level, but it seems to have processed all the images now and is onto the file cache, it should be safe enough to just leave it running and giving it a kick from time to time to make sure it hasn't stalled, and hopefully won't affect the gallery itself too much.

jolly!

I didn't get round to testing it! I thought the post said 11th September???

Well done though. Great work

Took a little longer than usual to get the site up over here, but so far seems ok.
Good work again Spack!

Yeah Matt, it did say 10/11 originally - not sure why I put those dates, as I'd intended it to be the weekend just gone.

Good expectation management skills?

"Look, I did it a whole week early!"

Then again, maybe this is just test week - you're all just beta testers till next weekend when I hit the "done" button. /me frantically writes "done" on the f12 key on his keyboard