Hopefully the last of the changes
'Tis the season for change, it seems. And after a lot of changes with the site and jobs, I've had to make yet another change. Namely to my web-hosts.
I orders a VPS with 1 and 1, configured it and set this domain to be transferred to them so everything could be working nicely, just as I want it (and so I could play around with server management). After a week of waiting for the domain to be transferred I thought I would get in touch with them to see whether I had made a mistake, or when the domain was going to be transferred. I got the following response from them:
This is a bug on the system that is already known and reported to our developers. At the moment, we do not have an estimated time frame for the fix however
It left me wondering what kind of bug could possibly be introduced to a process which has been around for over 20 years, and why there was a) no testing to find this, and b) why they had nothing in place to fix an issue which is, essentially, a core part of their business.
I was less than happy.
After a few days of going back and forth with them and them insisting there was nothing which could be done (despite there being no warnings in the control panel that they are having an issue) I decided I was going to move providers. It was a process I was under anyway for the academic fun of server administration, so I wanted to continue. It turns out that 1 and 1 do offer the best value on their virtual servers, and their prices aren't beatable (at least not in the UK) for the same spec VPS. All other VPS solutions were expensive for the spec, but I found a really good deal with Easyspace for a dedicated server. Sorted. I've shut down my old VPS and got myself a dedicated server which I plan to use for a number of projects I have on the horizon.
I ordered the server and set the domain to transfer from the 1 and 1 transfer process to the Easyspace one, and within 24 hours (from confirming to 1 and 1 that I wanted to cancel) I was up and running on here. Fortunately I had a bit of time to get the server set up first, so the transition was nice and smooth. Sometimes things do just work.
So here I am, on my own server, managing my own server and hopefully having no further issues for a long time. Fingers crossed.