If you see this post, that means that your DNS is up to date and you got this page from the new server.

Right now, this site sits quite comfortably on a shared hosting account. However, shared hosting has its limits, and with a virtual machine (a so-called Virtual Private Server), I have root access so I can do with it whatever I want. And it comes with its own IP address, so I can finally set up secure (HTTPS) access to my web site with the certificate I already own.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks setting everything up to replace my existing hosting account. Apache, PHP and MySQL are all running but still need to be configured properly. Then, I will also need a mail and DNS server, neither of which I have experience with. So I’ll have to look into that as well.

My current hosting account won’t expire before April 2009, so I’m confident that I have everything set up by then. Somewhere between now and then, this web site will move to the new server.

The specs of the VM are more than enough to even run Windows XP smoothly. For a server however, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me. So just like my home server, it runs Debian Etch.

I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all files in the WordPress directory after a backup of wp-content. Then, I made a fresh SVN checkout, imported the WordPress backup, and tweaked the settings.

So right now, this web site runs a bare naked WordPress installation, the only active plugin being Akismet.

I’ve decided not to use my old theme again for this installation (it also became quite hacky after a while). Statistics show a rapid decline in Internet Explorer 6 usage. Last month, its share was about 15.7%, this month up to yesterday that number has dropped to 13.0. So either this month or the next, I expect IE6′s share to tumble beneath 10%, at which point I no longer deem it important enough to warrant support.

Then, I can finally make some more complex designs for this web site without a large number of visitors being stuck with crippled pages. Think about some more advanced CSS2 (IE7 is not quite the yet, but at least a lot better than is predecessor) and alpha channel support in PNG images without resorting to nasty hacks. Until that time comes, I’ll just use the default WordPress theme. It is fairly decent, despite being massively overused.

There’s a few other things on my todo list. First one is installing the few plugins that I do want to use, second is moving this web site to a new webhost again, this time a virtual private server, so I have root access and can do whatever I want. It also comes with its own IP address, so I can take care of the third item on the list: mirror this website on a subdomain and secure it with my SSL/TLS certificate — impossible right now, because SSL/TLS and name based virtual hosting don’t mix (without a not widely supported extension).

I also took this opportunity to move my photos page elsewhere. While NextGEN is a very decent plugin, I wanted to keep this installation als lean and clean as possible. So I chose to move my photo albums to my MobileMe gallery. In my upcoming new theme, I will link there more visibly, right now there’s just a small link in the sidebar.

Only one problem occured with the transition: all the links on the Links page are gone. Somehow they didn’t survive the WordPress export/import process. I’ll try to recover those from my database backup.

Otherwise, everything went pretty smoothly. All in all, my web site was down for less than two hours. Some users might still be seeing my old web site because their DNS cache hasn’t yet been updated, but that should last no more than 48 hours.

Update

I managed to import the links from a database dump, so now my web site is 100% functional again.