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I got a message from our host today and they are no longer going to be offering hosting. So by July 1 we have to find a new home. Again. Which I hate, but it is what it is. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I would really like to have cPanel access so if you are suggesting, that is a consideration.

Sorry for all the trouble.

Will we undergo another "Purge"?

Nope. No purging. At least, not on purpose.

By the way, for stats. The most bandwidth we've used is 132.55 GB and the storage space needs to be as high as you can get it. We're currently using about 25 GB of space.

Dave said:

by July 1 we have to find a new home. Again.

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What.

--Patrick

Any idea what our RAM usage has been like?

--Patrick

No idea.

Hrmm... I have over 350 gigs free on the SSD on the server I'm using to run my Empyrion/Left 4 Dead/Killing Floor 2 servers, and it has 48 gigs of ram, which I've pretty much never gone over 16 or so of useage...

Only problem is I don't have a static IP. I mean, I'm always connected, and I can't remember the last time my IP address actually changed... but it is a possible concern. Otherwise I could just throw up a XAMPP install and could host us pretty much no problem.

Is it worth looking into Amazon Web Services? I have no idea if it's in the budget (since I don't know what your budget its), but it would at least guarantee permanence for the forseeable future.

I've considered the same thing as Gas (since I also have bunches of unused hardware lying around) but I wouldn't trust my location to maintain power and Internet access for five nines. Heck, I doubt I could guarantee any building in this town (except one) would be able to keep power/access with any reliability.

That said, is there enough incentive to go CoLo somewhere? Or would it be more efficient to just get a VPS somewhere like SiteGround or BlueHost? Or even interServer.net, which appears to offer a 2C/4MB/60GB/2TB Linux VPS for $12/mo.

--Patrick

I need to find out our RAM use before I do anything else. But I'll look into all of those things.

I started hosting my websites database on AWS as an experiment, and my year's free offer just expired last month.
Base hosting fee is about $18.00 a month, and I get so little traffic that I don't get any traffic fees. That's just for the database, and not the web hosting--which I have thru godaddy at a pretty cheap rate. But I wouldn't recommend it (godaddy hosting) for here. There can often be latency issues--pages that can take 5-8 seconds to load.

I've got XAMPP running on my server now. I've got 20 mbit upstream on my cable modem, so I think I could handle just about anything. Dave, if you want to do an experimental export to my machine to see how it works, let me know.

Try Dreamhost

I have no idea how their pricing compares with any of the options here, but InMotion was great to me for the last two years, I just closed my site because I don't actually need a whole site dedicated just to me talking. It was $200 for two years, tons of storage, full cpanel support, and I think I was on their second tier offering, for whatever reason.

Well, so much for my idea. My cable company blocks port 80 (unless I pony up for a business account), so unless everybody wants to start remembering a custom port number, a webserver running from me will be a bit of a hassle.

Dave said:

By the way, for stats. The most bandwidth we've used is 132.55 GB and the storage space needs to be as high as you can get it. We're currently using about 25 GB of space.

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Is that 132.55GB / month? Year? Day? (that last one would be terrifying)

Eriol said:

Is that 132.55GB / month? Year? Day? (that last one would be terrifying)

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Month.

Eriol said:

Is that 132.55GB / month? Year? Day? (that last one would be terrifying)

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At the same time, throughput. Obviously

Any update with this or are we in the halforums endgame?

Trying to decide which one to use. But we're going SOMEWHERE! I figured I'd do it not this weekend but the next. Weekends are generally downtimes so it won't disrupt as much traffic.

Don't be afraid to disrupt traffic. If you gotta move, you gotta move.

MindDetective said:

Don't be afraid to disrupt traffic. If you gotta move, you gotta move.

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Sure.

But that doesn't mean I won't COMPLAIN. In BIG LETTERS. On HALFORUMS PREMIUM. See if I don't!

Bubble181 said:

Sure.

But that doesn't mean I won't COMPLAIN. In BIG LETTERS. On HALFORUMS PREMIUM. See if I don't!

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Be nice or I'll put you in the corner.

Oh, and with the impending demise of Google Hangouts, Halforums Premium will be going away, too

Noooooooooooo

Nice ruse to get rid of the owl, Gas.

Google Chat it is, then!

blotsfan said:

Nice ruse to get rid of the owl, Gas.

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Oh yeah? Well, I'm going to make my own Halforums Premium! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the blackjack and hookers, it'll just be me and 5 doomweasels discussing the day's work schedule - who's in charge of clean-up after squeesplosions, who's in charge of keeping the Queen happy, who has to wash underneath the Old One's flappy hooties, who has to find and train new recruits,...

There's still Twitter and Facebook for all your complaining needs.

Dave said:

There's still Twitter and Facebook for all your complaining needs.

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So we don't want the discord on Discord?

Shit.

And Discord.

Dave said:

Shit.

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Geez, Dave. No need to get Twitchy.

--Patrick

Poor Halforums subreddit, nobody wants you.

drifter said:

Poor Halforums subreddit, nobody wants you.

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And we still have a wiki!

FYI: Going to go with NameCheap. We already have an account with them as they are the ones who control our SSL certificates. It'll actually be saving us money and we'll have unlimited bandwidth just in case.

I'm looking at making the move on the 1st - Monday. I want it to be after the first of the month to better align with my paychecks. So there's a good chance we will be down on Monday into Tuesday. I still have to run this past the current host as he's going to assist and I want to make sure he's around.

As always, Dave, if you need help, for gods’ sake ASK.

—Patrick

Dave said:

FYI: Going to go with NameCheap. We already have an account with them as they are the ones who control our SSL certificates. It'll actually be saving us money and we'll have unlimited bandwidth just in case.

I'm looking at making the move on the 1st - Monday. I want it to be after the first of the month to better align with my paychecks. So there's a good chance we will be down on Monday into Tuesday. I still have to run this past the current host as he's going to assist and I want to make sure he's around.

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Did you figure out what happened last time that made us lose 3 months? I'm not trying to tease you, I just wanted to make sure we don't lose anything in the big move again.

Celt Z said:

Did you figure out what happened last time that made us lose 3 months? I'm not trying to tease you, I just wanted to make sure we don't lose anything in the big move again.

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That had more to do with Dave deleting things he shouldn't have than a server move.

Celt Z said:

Did you figure out what happened last time that made us lose 3 months? I'm not trying to tease you, I just wanted to make sure we don't lose anything in the big move again.

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He knew immediately. He just couldn’t undo it.

—Patrick

Yup. What happened last time was:

We were starting to get close to our storage limit. So I decided to blow away the test version of the boards, essentially cutting our usage in a little less than half. Turns out that when we were testing for the upgrade to XF 2.0 we pointed the database to test, but after we went back to live, we (meaning me) didn't switch the DB back to live and were running on test the entire time. So when I blew the test side away I was actually deleting the live version. And that's also how we found out the the "daily backups" from the host were more like "uh...d'oh?"

So it was me forgetting a crucial step rather than anything else. But the new host has backups so even if I fuck up again we'll be safe.

I think one of the best "rules" in IT is "always make sure to have a backup before making changes."

I'd suggest that you take a good backup of the database and whatever you can for at least the config and have it saved outside of the current host, as a just in case, before the hosting ends. You never know what could happen, especially during a host switch.

To be fair, I thought I did. The host said he did and I had no reason not to believe him.

And I'm going to be shutting down the site and taking a backup on Monday before the transfer. We may be down for 24 hours as the DNS has to point to the new place.

I already have withdrawal jitters just thinking about it

Bubble181 said:

I already have withdrawal jitters just thinking about it

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I'll protect you, young owl.

Emrys said:

I'll protect you, young owl.

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A day without a good dook is a day not lived!

Any word on the SSL cert? My browser is still giving me the "not secure" thing.

Eriol said:

Any word on the SSL cert? My browser is still giving me the "not secure" thing.

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Weird..Mine's not.

Tinwhistler said:

Weird..Mine's not.

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I'm in Chrome here, so presumably "normally" up-to-date. I'll have to check at home.

Firefox shows green SSL to me, but chrome says not "fully" secure... but once I bypassed the warning once, it never came back.

Re-starting Chrome solved my problem. So probably just the "bypass" done when things were moving.

Cert says it's set to expire in a month (Aug 6), so might want to get it all figured out by then.

--Patrick

I’ll probably be getting an email about it. I’ll look at it when I get home Saturday.