This evening, I completed the migration of all sites in the prwdot.org domain to a new hosting provider. For non-techies, all this means to you is that if you tried to access our site earlier tonight and got any error messages or saw broken image icons, that’s why. Everything should be back to normal now, but please do let me know if you see anything that seems to be broken.

If you’re interested in some technical details of this move, feel free to read on.

I’ve long been considering a move from ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***’s shared hosting environment to a “Virtual Dedicated Server” environment. A VDS would give me more control over the operation of the server, from compiling custom modules into ***Apache|http://httpd.apache.org/***, to installing new softare, to expanding system resources.

Recently, on the ***Boston.pm|http://boston.pm.org/*** mailing list, I heard tell of a company called ***TekTonic|http://www.tektonic.net/***. They offered a selection of VDS’s running the ***Virtuozzo|http://www.sw-soft.com/en/products/virtuozzo/*** VDS platform. The price was right at $15/month for a base account, so I decided to try it out. I signed up for an account on December 9, and as a test I moved the ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/*** over to the new server. Very few people probably noticed the switch, but it gave me a chance to test a fairly isolated site. I liked what I saw.

Next, I migrated all of the prwdot.org email services over to the TekTonic server. This was another fairly isolated system and the move went pretty well. I did spend a bit of extra time here, because I wanted to get the ***Horde|http://www.horde.org/*** application framework (which includes the IMP webmail program) and the ***SpamAssassin|http://www.spamassassin.org/*** spam fighting tool set up properly. That was all more or less finished this week.

Tonight, I moved all of the remaining prwdot.org website data over to the new server. Using the MySQL ‘mysqldump’ command, it was quite easy to bring all of my blog entries over. Only took a few minutes to get MovableType up and running.

So now everything is set. I think I have most of the major kinks ironed out, but there are sure to be a few surprises here and there as I get used to working with the new environment. As Ben Parker told his nephew Peter, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I hope to use my new power responsbily, and I also hope to not become too obsessed with tweaking the site to perfection now that I have the opportunity to do so. Luckily I have Becky to keep me in line if I start getting out of control. 🙂

Anyway, please let me know if you have any questions about this new setup, or if you see anything that looks like an error. I hope to make the most of prwdot.org’s new home.