24 August 2017

Update: If you can read this the site has been successfully moved and everything should be working again.

Original post: I’m going to be moving the site to a new server, probably some time Friday morning or early afternoon, UK time. To prevent the loss of any annotations, I’ll be turning off the ability to post annotations before I start.

Although the move shouldn’t take long (I’ve run through the process once) it can take hours, at least, for news of the change to reach all parts of the internet. I’ll update this post on the new server with a message, so you’ll be able to tell when it’s all working again.

For anyone curious… I’m going to be moving the site from a server at Digital Ocean back to Heroku, even though it was only a couple of years ago that I moved in the other direction. Hosting the site at Digital Ocean was interesting — I had to learn a huge amount because it requires a lot more manual work. Heroku is more automated and hides a lot of the gritty details away. But getting things working on Digital Ocean, and changing anything, was taking up too much time. And I was rarely confident I’d done it well. Administering servers isn’t something I feel confident in and I’d rather spend my time designing and writing new or improved things. Although Digital Ocean is cheaper (US$5 per month) than Heroku ($16) this move won’t break the bank, and the saving in my time and peace of mind will be well worth it.