Website Maintenance

hostroutelogoThe main reason for the lack of updates on this Blog for most of the summer has been due to procrastination over whether or not to move my entire site, along with four other domains, to the cloud hosting service offered by my web-hosts Hostroute, who I’ve been with since 2001. Their homepage boasts the benefits (greater reliability, super-fast, multiple backups, green), but to be honest I’ve never had any problems with them in the last 11 years, and was concerned by the fact I would have to do a manual move of all the files, emails and databases since the architecture was totally different. The pluses however were that I could control all my domains under one umbrella, have greater control over them (as well as saving money) and have the choice of php versions under each sub-domain which has been an issue recently with installed packages.

I also get increased disk space, bandwidth, and unlimited databases, subdomains, email addresses (although I was never going to get close to the previous limits other than databases). In particular, I also needed a home for the domain of a new module I am about to run at Uni (MA255 Virtual Mathematics), and didn’t want to set up entirely new hosting for it, it would be much easier to host it under an existing setup.

As it turned out, the move wasn’t as bad as I feared. It was straightforward (mostly) to transfer installed packages such as WordPress, Moodle, Mediawiki as long as I kept on top of the changes needed for config files and database entries. The main issue was the change in the way subdomains were treated, but now, hopefully, the move is complete and I have fixed all the odd anomalies (at least, those that I have encountered). The thing I was most worried about was transferring email, but the use of Thunderbird to copy all emails and folders to PC, and then upload them to new mail server turned out to be easy (once I’d got over the fear of losing years of archived emails!).

So now I’m in the cloud! Well, in a cloud anyway…

Work still to complete:

  • I am in the process of updating the backend of ufo.dave-wood.org to produce a less dated looking archive site, this is turning out to be a bigger job than anticipated due to the sheer volume of material;
  • The site for MA255 Virtual Mathematics still needs a lot of work to get it ready for the start of term, two weeks away (there will be future blog posts here on the progress of that module);
  • I had installed a chess server, but try as I might I could not get it transferred to the new hosting, this annoyed me, and I’d like to understand why.

Dave

Mathematician at the University of Warwick in the UK with research interests in equivariant bifurcation theory and applications, especially in modelling of insect locomotion. Teaching interests include online learning and innovative teaching methods. Also in a past life has been involved in summer school courses, and online material, for Gifted and Talented. He has been active on the Internet since 1995, initially though his UFO and Michael Schenker website, but now through a multitude of projects.

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