The Great Shirithian Hosting Experiment

[Ari Rahikkala]

I recently got myself an account with Bluehost for the purpose of placing in it all the stuff that I've wanted to host over the last... rather long time, actually. Shireroth's going to first-ish. I'm not entirely certain it'll all work out, nor when I'll do it (I'd prefer to do this on a weekday afternoon to cause the least disturbance to our users, but there isn't one on sight that I've got to myself and on which I am on DSL)... but if it does work out, expect a few short outages after which:

- all the services on shireroth.org will look and act exactly the same, except it'll be on a better webhost than Aplus, so it should perform better... and I do recall a couple of occasions when shireroth.org was down for me, too, those should become fewer.
- the forum will be hosted on shireroth.org/forum. There'll be a redirect in place on shireroth.kuroshiro.net (hopefully a very long-lived one).
- email addresses and such... I'll have to look into those. Is there anyone around who actually uses a @shireroth.org email address?
- Erik will be provided FTP and database access... I don't suppose there's anyone else left who needs access of that kind to shireroth.org?

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

Sounds alright, though I have no idea about these things, really...

But... how does this affect the wiki?

[Ari Rahikkala]

If everything goes well, in no visible way except for a couple of hours downtime for the move and... well, shireroth.org might be down-ish for a couple of days due to stale DNS caches, but that can always be dealt with. (read: You might get redirected to ari-rahikkala.net/shireroth or a similar URL when you access shireroth.org. There's nothing to worry about there - the different URL will be the only visible change - and in at most a couple of days shireroth.org will work directly again)

[Gman Russell]

Because Ari rocks!

[Erik Mortis]

Ari put this before me this morning. I like the idea that I won't have to pay for hosting anymore... As I'm broke. And we will have our forum and site on one server.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I unexpectedly found an opportunity to handle the beginning of this today. shireroth.org's public face will be replaced with a redirect to this thread soon...

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

It has already :P

[Ari Rahikkala]

Yes... now I just wish I had a faster internet connection... it turns out I can't open outgoing connections from either end of the move, so I need to copy everything over to my home box before sending it over to the new host...

[Erik Mortis]

lame.

[Gman Russell]

Erik, I want to talk to you over AIM or in a chatroom next time I see you.

[Ari Rahikkala]

After way too much waiting for stuff to upload http://shireroth.org should be back in business now. That is if you get the new shireroth.org. If you get the old one you'll just get redirected to this thread. This might happen if you get old DNS information - that should, however, resolve itself in a couple of days at most.

Soooooo... reports please! Does shireroth.org seem to work for you folks?

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

Aye aye, captain.

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

I'm redirected to this thread...

[Kaiseress Anandja I]

I'm redirected to ShireWiki.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Very good... I'll change a few things around and see if I could pehaps get things in more working order so that I can move the forum over quickly... because if I don't get to do it tonight it could be annoyingly delayed...

[Ari Rahikkala]

OK, anyone getting the old shireroth.org should now get redirected to ari-rahikkala.net/shireroth. Next, I'll copy the live forum over and see if any quirks occur... if there are none or they are easily solveable, I'll close the forum down and copy it again so we don't lose any posts to the move.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Let's see if posting works now...

[Ari Rahikkala]

The #micronations (chat) link should work now...

[Ari Rahikkala]

I'm going to go to sleep now. I'll get the calendar working tomorrow - that bit shouldn't be hard... also I'm going to try to do something about the avatars, though they're currently completely stumping me; They can be downloaded just fine with wget, they come with the right MIME type and so forth. My browser just isn't willing to show them for whatever reason. Please try to make use of various board features and report everything that's broken.

[Ari Rahikkala]

The ASC converter calendar works now. At least for me. Avatars should work too - seems the trouble that confused me was caching on the client side. I set avatars to expire from cache immediately for now, I'll reset it to the original setting later. If avatars still aren't showing up for you you might try force-reloading the page (ctrl-f5, or command-r on mac). Images in general don't seem to be working on the forum when using it through ari-rahikkala.net, but that'll resolve itself.

I demand reports of breakage or non-breakage!

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

Everything seems to be working for me

Thanks, Ari!

[Oroigawa Koreyasu]

I have had zero problems, cap'n.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Erik's been PM'd his new credentials for FTP and phpMyAdmin.

I get 2500 email addresses with this account. If anyone wants to get set up with a @shireroth.org address I'll look into it (there might be a nominal fee in erb payable to the crown account).

I also get $50 in Google AdWords credits for either free or for five bucks, I don't precisely know which. Uhh, that's... probably not much in the world of advertising. I don't know, I've never run a campaign. But if someone's interested and seems to know this stuff I'll send zir the promotional code.

Also, I'll be on LOA-ish (part-time offline, part-time behind gprs) for a couple of days again starting early tomorrow morning. Anyone finding broken stuff should probably report it quickly if they want it fixed this week .

[Leo Fenrir]

Ari = Awesome

Everything seems to be working like a charm.

[Jacobus Loki]

I am so impressed I can't speak!

[Erik Mortis]

emails should be purchased from the crown.

[Prince Ísur-Ai]

... unless their usage is needed in the course of imperial duty?

[Austi_Scot]

I also get $50 in Google AdWords credits for either free or for five bucks,

I could use that -

[Ari Rahikkala]

I would be interested in seeing what you intend to do with it though

[Ari Rahikkala]

Eh, I'll be moving the domain registration to my account after all so Erik's account with Aplus can be completely cancelled. It's only ten bucks a year for me to pay, and simplifies administration a bit. Well, that is, I'll be trying to transfer the domain registration. It's not liking me much, really ):