The more they change …
In the previous post I vented a bit about how Microsoft was starting to seriously eat Apple’s lunch …
I have used the same shared hosting service for over ten years now, and while they are amazing people and always have gone above and beyond for me … I needed to move this site to a virtual server. I spent the better part of last weekend looking at a ton of options, but in the end Amazon Web Service’s LightSail won me over.
This site (nor most personal websites) do not need a ton of horsepower, but I did need some flexibility that for security and performance reasons just could not be done on a shared host. LightSail was a breeze (punny?)! for under $100/year I have a dedicated Ubuntu instance, 1TB/mo of transfers and full control to completely screw things up should I choose to do something outstandingly stupid 🙂
If you are reading this, then my DNS changes have kicked in and propagated to your DNS resolver.
Moving was pretty straight forward:
- Built a base Ubuntu VM using Amazon’s Ubuntu image
- Installed a bunch of crap I needed (apt-get is your friend)
- Set up my Apache Virtual Hosts (screwed a few things up & fixed them in the process)
- Read and RE-READ too many pages of Apache configuration docs … its been a LONG time
- SSH‘d into shell at my previous host
- used mysqldump to backup the MySQL database
- Tar and BZip’d my web directory
- moved backups to the new server
- Restored the MySQL file into MariaDB
- And yes there are good reasons and no downsides to switching from MySQL
- Unzipped the files, checked, rechecked and fixed (a few times) the permissions and ownership of the files/directories
- Updated DNS to point www.hoke.org and hoke.org to the new AWS hosted machine
Viola!
Well… I hope so. The purpose of this post is to make sure everything is working right after all that 🙂
Still left to do … Once DNS fully propagates I have to register www.hoke.org for a https certificate with LetsEncrypt… as well as figure out if I can have a LetsEncrypt certificate work for both www.hoke.org and hoke.org … back to the docs (worst case is I have to redirect one to the other …)
Stay Tuned …
[Update] So I had some downtime at the hotel … TLS is enabled, LetsEncrypt Certbot FTW
