I think everyone should put up their top 5 stinkers and weight them, so no1 gets 5 points etc. Create the compilation from the top 10 highest scorers:

1. Mystic Rhythms
2. Big Money
3. Dog Years
4. Bravest Face
5. Force Ten  (this is not that bad, but it's the song that started to turn me off Rush in the mid 80s)

Sounds good, let's see if we can break it 

Seriously though, thanks for the work you are doing Slim. Really appreciated.

Hospital called: I can go in for a second opinion on my foot coming Monday.
Never thought I'd live to see the day.

Quote from: captainkurtz on July 28, 2026, 09:32:22 AMSnakes and Arrows

Had exactly the same thought.

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However the OS is a bit out of date now.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, 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.

Quote from: Nickslikk2112 on July 28, 2026, 10:18:24 AM

Quote from: Thenop on July 28, 2026, 10:07:20 AM

Quote from: captainkurtz on July 28, 2026, 09:32:22 AMSnakes and Arrows

The whole album then?

Certainly work with Vapid Trials

Nooooooo!

Quote from: Fishy on July 28, 2026, 08:33:02 AMTai Shan
Mystic Rhythms
The garden
Rivendell
Tears
Animate
Sweet Miracle
I think I'm going bald


Absolute dross

Happy to make available with this a 3 track dross ep of

In the mood
Countdown
Test for echo

Quote from: Thenop on July 28, 2026, 10:07:20 AM

Quote from: captainkurtz on July 28, 2026, 09:32:22 AMSnakes and Arrows

The whole album then?

Certainly work with Vapid Trials

Quote from: Fishy on July 28, 2026, 08:33:02 AMTai Shan
Mystic Rhythms
The garden
Rivendell
Tears
Animate
Sweet Miracle
I think I'm going bald


Absolute dross

Oh dear, we are not going to agree on some of those..

Quote from: captainkurtz on July 28, 2026, 09:32:22 AMSnakes and Arrows

The whole album then?