I just completed moving the abercrombie-family.org hosted websites from RCTHOST.COM to HOSTMONSTER.COM.
I started hosting at RCTHOST back in 2002, when they were just starting up, and they gave me a pretty good deal as an early customer (unlimited disk and bandwidth for $30 p.a., subject to reasonable restrictions). Initially I had some problems getting CGI to run, but had positive interactions with their live support people and was pretty happy.
Over the years though, I’ve found their servers unreliable and slow, and their support non-existent.
- I’ve seen server outages as often as monthly
- The administrative pages and ftp server seem to be nice’d down to a level that they’re unusable. Recently the ftp server can’t maintain a connection long enough for “mirror” to push the deltas to abercrombie-family.org from my local system, so I have nearly a full year of pending family photos to upload.
- Support emails go into a black hole. There is no support forums or wiki showing any activity.
- The straw on the camel’s back was to do with email: I configure DNS with RCTHOST’s server as the MX destination for all abercrombie-family.org email. That server then forwards mail for various recipients to better places for reading mail. Recently however, OMEGA.RCTHOST.COM got onto a mail blacklist, so the various well behaved places that we want to read our email at were refusing to accept forward from RCTHOST. We can’t live with unreliable email!
So I read some reviews and went shopping, and ended up with HOSTMONSTER’s cheapo plan, $5 per month (twice as expensive). Everything pretty much the same except for a few details, some good, some bad.
- Admin pages and FTP server respond very well
- No down time yet
- ssh access to my server! This is really good news. Not that I particularly need shell access, but I love being able to mirror my local copy of the website using rsync. If I try to update the mirror with no deltas outstanding, rsync takes 6s to do nothing, instead of about 90s using ftp mirror.
- Excellent customer support responsiveness. I’ve sent three email requests and had resolutions to all of them within half an hour.
- Now the bad stuff:
- No “catch-all” email address for a domain. Typically you can direct all otherwise unrouted email for a domain to a single mailbox. Hostmonster doesn’t do this, so mail to joe.random@abercrombie-family.org would be dropped. I prefer to catch all mail somewhere. Some day I’ll document my creative solution.
- Can’t forward email to an address containing a “+” symbol. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but my preferred email host, fastmail.fm, lets me send mail to pabercrombie+folder@fastmail.fm to have the mail automatically put into a folder. Turns out there is a workaround at the fastmail end, so this was not a big deal either.
- That’s all. So far
The migration was easy.
- I first established the account with hostmonster.
- Then I used the administrative pages at RCTHOST.COM to create a full backup of my filespace there (a gzipped tar file of all my files was dumped in my ~ directory, and I ftp’d it back home).
- I also created a backup of my mysql databases (this bl0g is backed by a mysql database. Nothing else of interest). The backup is a sql file, again dumped into my ~ directory, again I ftp’d it home.
- Now I modified my DNS records (hosted at MYDOMAIN.COM) to point to NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM and NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM as nameservers. That means that as that percolates out into DNS, clients will start being pointed to the hostmonster servers for www.abercrombie-family.org instead of the rcthost servers
- Then I remirrored my local copy of the web pages up to hostmonster, and was mostly ready to roll
- Getting the mysql stuff configured right took a while longer
All in all, I’m pleased with the result and surprised it went so smoothly.
Hope these notes help anybody else trying anything similar.