It's no secret that the new server we moved to in January has sucked.
I learned my lesson about looking for the best bargain, and went with a well established company : 1&1 Ionos. They are one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and I used them from 2005-2011 with no downtime or issues. The monthly cost is $10, which is what we were paying before the move in January.
The move should kick off around 1:30 pm today, and be done in an hour or two.
Over the last year, the site disk storage requirements have been getting closer to the limits of our current hosting provider. We have had the current provider for over three years, so it was time to evaluate competitors anyway. I ended up findng one that offers a lot more storage at a much lower price along with better performance, so it’s moving time.
With moving, I did some behind the scenes clean up, and decided to make one change: the new server will only support HTTPS, encrypting all traffic. All existing links will still work, but will automatically redirect you from http to https. The only difference you should notice besides an extra “s” in URLs is that the site will now be considered secure by your browser and you will not get annoying messages warning you to not enter your password on newer browsers.
I will most likely make the move this evening (Friday, January 4), meaning a few hours of downtime.
So I have not been very diligent about documenting the site finances, but then again we no longer have expense or donations as large as the first few years.
Moving forward with a new hosting provider, the ongoing costs will be lower: $35/year for hosting $26/year for domain registration (estimate, pre-paid through 2021) $12/year for backup storage (approximate) == $73/year total
This site is hosted on a Virtual Private Server from OpenVirtuals, using their SSD-Combo Professional plan. I am the only one who has access to the OpenVirtuals account.
The virtual server runs Debian Linux (currently Debian 8 - Jessie). I am the only one who can log into the server. The virtual server is only used for lifeinbklyn.
The http server is Apache2, and the database server is MySQL.
Backups are taken nightly, stored on Amazon Web Services S3, and can only be accessed by me.
There is a bug where some people cannot see pics in private groups.
As a short-term work, around, access the site via lifeinbklyn.com (no www, with a y).
I will fix this in the next week.
I am also thinking about making it so that whatever url you access the site as, you will automatically get redirected to lifeinbklyn.com This will fix issues with having to log in again when accessing links with a different url name, while still keeping the security session system used by the site intact.
