It’s been a pretty annoying couple of days on the website server front.
The server locking up intermittently is one thing, and for all I know, maybe my fault? The incompetence of the hosting company is quite something else.
Just so you are aware why I was doing my nut yesterday, the hosting company had disabled my ability to force a power cycle of my dedicated server while they did a hardware test. They forgot to re-enable it when they finished. I rang to ask them to re-enable it and also power cycle to server. It took them over 70 minutes to achieve the power cycle and it was the following day before the interface to allow me to force a power cycle was enabled again. Amateurs!
They offered to give me a free month of hosting, but I refused. Last night I moved the whole thing to Amazon Web Services so that’s the new home for the website. I finished the build and testing, then flipped the DNS and went to bed, figuring the DNS propagation can take up to 24 hours, so why hang around. 🙂
Regarding AWS:
- I’ve gone for a pretty small instance type at the moment. I’ll see how that goes and expand if needed. It seems OK to me at the moment.
- It’s just a single VM for now. If that proves problematic I’ll consider adding another and shoving a load balancer in front of it all. I’ve had plenty of practice with load balancers recently. 🙂
- It’s just in a single European data centre. I’ve gone for the cheap and cheerful approach of not paying for the Multi Availability Zone option. So when the data centre in Ireland goes down and I start complaining, remind me I’m a cheapskate. 🙂
- My email is still being handled by the old clowns. I’ve got to find a new home for that.
- I’m not sure how much this is going to cost at this point. I’ll keep an eye on it over the next few days/weeks and decide if this is the right move. Once I’ve made a decision, I’ll buy a reserved instance of the appropriate size, which will reduce the costs a bit. Either that, or look for an alternative option that’s cheaper. 🙂
Fingers crossed.
Cheers
Tim…