Files-a-copying, zones-a-serialized! YARRR we’re on the move! </pirate>

Ahem…*cough* 🙂 Now that that’s out of my system. I made a decision at the beginning of this month to move all of my hosting to an Amazon EC2 instance. While nowhere near ideal for web hosting and not really much cheaper than my current hosting arrangements, and quite frankly only cheaper as long as my bandwidth usage stays down! I decided to switch for a number of reasons. Part of those are the fact I honestly don’t want to deal with the hardware anymore if I can avoid it. Tehy really really really NEED to get IPv6 support though…and that will be the deciding factor as to if I stay using EC2 or not. Without IPv6 they’re garbage and I’ll go elsewhere and pay more, because I’ll have no choice, just to get IPv6 support.

The web sites will have about the same CPU and RAM as they had before, but may actually be somewhat faster because the storage should be faster. The (soon to be) old hosting setup I’d elected to build uses NFSv4 and the Linux automounter, an experiment that proved to me that Linux NFSv4 is NOT ready for prime time (even in my limited setup NFSv4 will occasionally go off into the woods and NEVER come back short of a reboot of the machine, this happens most often on the web server and once in a while to the mail server) the automounter has been stable but NFSv4 mounts are dog slow, with, or without encryption setup.

So if you notice any oddities this week that is most likely why. I’ve already finished moving my @wgops.com email over to the new setup and it seems to be working fine. This weekend I’m going to try to get dotblag.com moved over to the new setup. If that goes well then I’ll get in touch with the few people I host and we’ll get them moved over to the new machine too. This is actually a really small move, but I’m going between completely unmanaged hosting, to trying out a management UI/platform, DTC. If things don’t go well with the dotblag.com move then I’ll have to scramble and figure out something else ASAP! I can’t really afford to pay for both the old hosting and the new hosting.

Incidentally if you need reliable Colo, VPS, or web hosting, especially if you’re running a dynamic PHP application powered site but don’t want to pay premiums for dedicated hosting, get in touch with Modwest. I might be leaving them, but it’s not because there’s anything wrong with them!