This site is currently hosted on a cloud server that I created, years ago, in Amazon's AWS cloud infrastructure. The server hosts a couple of other sites - a personal blog site and a cycling blog site among them.
It's costing me about $12 a month which is cheap enough - that's mostly the basic server cost and the storage for snapshots (backups).
However the OS is a bit out of date now.
Since, at some point, we need to move to a newer server (easier and tidier than upgrading the OS in situ), I thought I'd have a look around at alternatives to AWS.
Long story short: I'm going to spin up the new server at OVHcloud (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/), not AWS. Because I can get a server with two virtual cores, 4GB RAM, 40GB NVMe disk and unlimited traffic for a bit less than £4 a month inc VAT. That's a better spec than the existing server (four times the RAM for one thing).
I've done the due diligence. Although I confess I hadn't heard of them and never worked with them when I did this sort of thing for a living, they operate roughly 500,000 servers across 46 data centres, serve about 1.6 million customers and have a decent reputation. The VPS product has a 99.9% availability SLA.
The only slight drawback is that the control panel is likely a bit less sophisticated and slick, but I can live with that. I'll get to try it before switching over anyway.
So what I'll do is spin up a new server, copy this site over to it and operate it in test mode for a few days. I'll invite people to try the test version (https://test.betweenthewheels.net probably) just to make sure it works, while the existing site will remain live at the usual address.
Then, once we're satisfied it's all working properly and any teething issues have been ironed out, I'll recopy the live site to it, close down the live site and make the new site work from the https://betweenthewheels.net/ address. Any and all posts made to the "test" version of the site will disappear when I replace its test database with the latest copy of the live one.
There might be a bit of disruption during the switchover but because the site is proxied through Cloudflare this should be minimal - the DNS address will stay the same and the switch will happen under the bonnet.
This is mostly just for interest / information, but by all means let me know if you have questions or comments. I'll add any news to this thread as it happens.
Sounds good, let's see if we can break it ;D
Seriously though, thanks for the work you are doing Slim. Really appreciated.
Agreed , thanks for all the behind the scenes work.
So I've bought the host, logged in to it:
ubuntu@vps-91aee39a:~$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3819 391 2807 1 846 3427
Swap: 0 0 0
ubuntu@vps-91aee39a:~
Updated the OS, checked out the console. Just to make sure I can start it from the console I shut it down, and restarted it. That worked.
So far so good .. will install the database software, PHP etc tomorrow. Feels a bit like coming out of retirement.
Would it help if we could make a donation to help with the running costs James?
If you need any help with the more technical stuff James I can be contacted at;
Utterlyuseless123@luddite.co.uk
Quote from: pxr5 on July 29, 2026, 04:29:02 PMWould it help if we could make a donation to help with the running costs James?
That's thoughtful of you but at slightly more than £4 a month (I added regular snapshots to the original quote) and considering I have other sites on there, and it's a bit of a hobby as well I'm more than happy to cover it myself. Really do appreciate the offer though.
I've installed the usual packages necessary for Wordpress sites and forums like this to work - MySQL (database), Apache2 (web server), PHP (website language / processor).
The old server was based in a data centre in Virginia so I called it 'virginian'. The new one is based in a data centre in SE London, Erith to be precise. I lived in SE London for seven years and had never heard of Erith. But Denis Thatcher ran his family's chemicals/preservatives business there until the mid-1960s, so I'm calling it 'denis'.
Moved my cycling blog database to the new host, then set up the SSL certificate, moved the blog content and the Apache2 config. I changed the DNS last night to give it time to propogate. Works! Live at:
https://bikediary.uk/
So I've established that DNS, Cloudflare, Apache, PHP 8.3, MySQL 8, WordPress and automated TLS all work on the new server.
Going well so far, next thing is to make a copy of this site and set it up as a test site on the new host. I'll have to put the site in maintenance mode for 25 minutes or so to take a copy but I'll give advance notice. Maybe tonight.
So - this is in fact the test site. Thanks for visiting.