So, the time has come to change hosting providers and that will entail moving an entire operating system to a different data center in another city. This is much like moving a house, not a trivial task. I have had the same IP and server location in Fremont, CA since 2017 when I moved from Digital Ocean after losing a bunch of data. Linode has since been purchased by Akamai which has it’s pros and cons, but this decision is being made simply because their pricing isn’t competitive and I need more resources. This website has been running on a 2-core processor with 4G of RAM. Everything is installed bare metal style on a now custom Arch Linux and I have been able to provide my own mail server, web server, VPN, several databases and admin panels. This is way cheaper than paying for hosted services and gives much greater control over configuration.

To augment the 80GB storage capacity I have, I started using Cloudflare R2 storage and have already migrated all of the images in my library which total ~500GB and that can now grow infinitely and affordably. Then, after trying every photo management solution I could make work on my system (I should write a blog post about this), so many lacked features or had other problems, I finally installed Immich and finally got it working. LibrePhotos was a close second but I couldn’t overcome slow load times for the thumbnails using the cloud. A similar problem was solved when fine tuning Immich that may have helped a number of appilactions that depend on R2 – note, I found this reading the man page not from a forum – the trick is to mount a remote bucket with rclone and be sure to pass the ‘–vfs-cache-mode full’, then use a large cache size and there are no problems even with video. Immich also provides a rich Android app that’s a client and auto uploads to the server – perfect.

The problem now is, whenever I have to update Immich it entails shutting down services, resizing the server to a more powerful plan, then downloading and compiling from source… then cleaning up the filesystem, resizing down again so I don’t have to pay too much, and starting everything back up – and this should happen whenever Android decides to auto update the client app? Lol. I also keep running into problems trying to get The Skylight working, the section for live and prerecorded video streaming, and I’m sure more processing power would help. So, with Owncast, VLC Manager, and soon Jitsi… this crab has outgrown it’s shell.

Finding a new provider was not easy. There are too many of them, and too few reliable and reputable. After a ton of research, I narrowed it down to only a few cost effective options. The most tempting possibility was to move to a dedicated server here in Oregon hosted by OVH US for about $45 a month. It would be lightning fast and extremely dependable, but it’s really more than I need. I pay $24 for Linode but for a fraction of the power. Hostinger was another possibility for a VPS since I was searching based mostly on price. There are many quality options out there that come at a very high price, and many cheap options that are simply inadequate. I finally settled on Ionos, a German company that was 1and1 when I got my fist SSL certificate from them. They’re expanding in the US and now have 3 data centers, one of them in Las Vegas. And for $30 a month, I’ll get 8 cores, 16GB of RAM, and 480GB storage. The savings you get when paying yearly is misleading and there is no discounted rate for the long term, so I’ll keep things month to month.

Starting today, there maybe down times as I migrate to a new location. This is a multi-day process since it’s not the only thing I have on my agenda (I still need to mow the lawn, too). Hopefully, creating a custom ISO and booting it from a new server will go smoothly, but there are likely to be misconfigurations after this many years. Even if there are no changes required on the OS, it can awhile for DNS pools to be repopulated with the right IP number. Then I’ll get around to fixing the mail server the way Google likes it, I’ll finish The Skylight, add photos like promised, and even make a jeep page. Soon, really. There’s a drone and onboard video that’s almost done, too. Launch time is around the corner.