Upcoming outage due to change of hosting

[Laird]

Due mostly to excessive cost increases, I'm moving hosts from Hostgator (shared hosting) to Ionos (a VPS), and Psience Quest will be moving with me unless the community has an alternative preference for its hosting (I'm only hosting it by default given that I already had a multi-domain hosting account, which was the natural choice for PQ).

The savings are roughly 80%, and even compared to prior to the most recent, excessive cost increase, the savings are 65%. A VPS also offers me/us much more control, not that we particularly need it.

I will let the community know in this thread at least 24 hours in advance exactly when the downtime will be when I know myself. Everything's going smoothly so far, so I don't anticipate that it will be too far off. It has to be well before the 7th of January, which is when Hostgator would charge for the next renewal period.

The steps will be something like this:

1. The board and wiki will be toggled closed, temporarily preventing access so nothing changes while I retrieve a copy of the two databases.
   
2. I'll restore those database on the new host, make sure everything's working, then have @Ninshub (in whose name it's registered) point the domain name to that new host.
   
3. I'll then toggle the board and wiki on this host back open (so folk can continue to read content) but with a big warning that the host has changed, and that if you're seeing the warning, you simply need to wait for your name server to update itself to point to the new host, and that you should in the meantime refrain from posting because anything you post will be lost.
   
4. Soon enough (within a day or so), everybody's name servers will direct them to the new host.
   
5. Finally, I'll cancel the Hostgator hosting, and soon enough the old copy of the board will be no more.
   

Questions, comments, and other feedback welcome.

I'm not sure of the mechanics of the host change, would it make sense to put some sort of redirect on the current host, pointing to the new site (possibly using an IP address instead of hostname) to help smooth the transition? It would only be a temporary measure, not sure whether it would help or complicate/confuse things.

[Laird]

I'm not sure of the mechanics of the host change, would it make sense to put some sort of redirect on the current host, pointing to the new site (possibly using an IP address instead of hostname) to help smooth the transition? It would only be a temporary measure, not sure whether it would help or complicate/confuse things.

It would have to be an IP address, yes, because of course for those seeing the site on its old host the domain name is by definition not yet resolving to the IP of the new host. Probably, yes, the web server on the new host could be configured to serve PQ by default when the web server is accessed by IP address rather than domain name, but that MyBB supports that (while at the same time supporting access via domain name) is something I very much doubt based on what I know. I could investigate further to see whether despite my doubts it is possible, but the potential gain perhaps isn't worth the investment of time. (If you or anybody else comes up with a way of achieving this though, then that'd be great and we can make use of it).

We also have backup .org and .com domain names which currently redirect to the primary .net domain name, and perhaps we could point to the new host in advance, but then we'd have (1) the same problem of likely lack of support by MyBB for dual access (in this case via three different domain names), plus (2) the additional problem of inadvertently sending those using the backup domain names to the new host before it's finalised and ready.

I think you're right @Laird , it would not be straightforward to get such a redirect to work without a lot of extra effort (and even then it might not be possible). Doesn't feel like a good idea given the very short-term nature of the benefit to be gained.

[Laird]

I think you're right @Laird , it would not be straightforward to get such a redirect to work without a lot of extra effort (and even then it might not be possible). Doesn't feel like a good idea given the very short-term nature of the benefit to be gained.

Agreed. There is though a do-it-yourself solution that we could document for those inclined: members could edit the `/etc/hosts` (or equivalent) file on the machine from which they're browsing so as to manually point the `psiencequest.net` domain to the new IP address until such time as their name servers have it pointed there automatically.