Testing The Waters on Digital Ocean

A while back I set up a Digital Ocean VPS running OpenSIM.  I then promptly forgot about Digital Ocean.  Part of the problem was I forgot my password and form some lame reason the email didn’t show up when I searched my emails for “Digital Ocean”.  It was also more of a fun side project that didn’t really cost anything since DO gives you some credit when you sign up.

I’m thinking of using my VPS for a bit more though, specifically, as my new Web Host.  I currently use GoDaddy which works great and is affordable but I’m starting to do a bit more experimenting and coding and I feel like i could benefit from something with a little more versatility.  For a few bucks more than I currently pay for Godaddy I can get a pretty decent VPS going and at the very least host all of the blogs I currently maintain on it (currently 4 with little to no traffic, and 3 with reasonably light traffic).  i can always beef up the VPS if the load ends up being too much.

I wanted to test out the migration and set up though, I was going to move Raid-Tier over but it’s kind of in a state of limbo and i wanted something I use with some content behind it.  If I am going to discretely move my wife’s blogs over interruption free I need to KNOW I can do it and KNOW it will work.  One, she’ll get pissy if it doesn’t and two she is getting a fair amount of traffic and I’d hate to interrupt that.

So I moved Joshmiller.net here over.  I also moved my little Sandbox Project over at BloggingIntensifies.com over as well but mostly because it’s inconsequential if it gets lost somehow and I wanted a second domain on the hosting so I could make sure I’m doing the server configuration properly.

The migration wasn’t without issues.  For one, the SQL export from this blog is larger than I could get the SQL locally to import so I had to do an old fashioned WordPress import/export.  In my experience the WordPress import/export works great for small volumes of data but extremely poorly for large volumes of data.

I also had FTP issues, All of the help files for vsftp I could find were outdated (not uncommon with trying to solve Linux issues) and there is some newer “feature” i couldn’t figure out that seems to amount to “vsftp won’t run if root has ftp access”.  I’m not sure that’s right because like I said, I didn’t figure it out, i used SSH file transfer instead.  I needed to move all of the images from the old host to this host, all 3-4000 of them.  Its not a huge amount of files but it is a LOT of files.

i still have permissions issues I have not figured out.  Permissions are probably the most annoying part of using Linux, yeah yeah blah blah security, I get that, but fuck there is all this users and groups and who owns the files and who can write/use the files and what user and group are the processes using.  It’s kind of insane.  I even tried the whole “give everything full perms chmod 777” method to no success.

Which has left some broken internal links on this blog.  I’ll do some backend SQL work on it but basically, I set up the old blog to run on /Year/Month/Day/PostTitle Permalinks and the new one uses the ugly post?### style.  for some reason WordPress can’t change this setting in .htaccess and it still doesn’t work when I manually create the .htaccess file.  So screw it, for now it’s ugly links all around.

Phase two will be to pull Lameazoid and Raid-Tier over, if those go smoothly I’ll start with my wife’s less used/trafficked blog and see if she even notices, then work my way up from there.  The whole process actually should be seamless all around since ultimately the domain will point to the same structure and data on the same domain.

The point is do get a more versatile host to do some more complex projects without paying for TWO hosts.  I’d rather pay more for one host than putz with two hosts which end up costing more.  I also still plan to keep Godaddy for my domains for now, I’m not unhappy with the service over there by any means, I’ve just outgrown it.