It is when you are moving a website to a new hosting provider that you find all the little things you have taken for granted, everything that “just worked” but that has to be adjusted. My private website is ancient, I registered the domain in 1999 and at first it was hosted on a server that a couple of friends from the university hosted for free for several years, until the server was too old to keep running about five years ago. The server was just a simple Debian Linux server, and to avoid overloading it, the site is mostly static HTML files, with a few CGI scripts (some shell scripts, some Perl scripts, some compiled C binaries) for “interactivity”.

When I suddenly had to find a new home for the server five years ago, I already had an account on Dreamhost, which hosts the domain for this server. On Dreamhost I have been playing around with WordPress (for this site) and other stuff, but I just basically copied the other site over as-is. I have it all in version control (it was running CVS for a long while, but is now in Git), so it was fairly simple to get the stuff over. The problem was fixing up all the references in scripts, paths to home directories and the subtle Apache server configuration differences. Dreamhost was running Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, so the differences weren’t too big.

My friends also ran my email (with me doing all the spam filtering in Procmail). I didn’t want all my email to flow across the pond and back, so I got that hosted over at ABC-Klubben, which I have been a member of since around 1996. While their mail server was running BSD, it still supported Procmail, so after an initial mail loop and some mail ending up being nuked on receive, it worked mostly with the old setup.

I recently moved the site again. I didn’t really want a Swedish domain name hosted over in the US, especially with the worrying political trends over there. I live in Norway since 2000, and after looking for a while, I ended up chosing Nordhost as my local provider. They are running Debian, which means that most of the stuff worked. Some of the supporting scripts have started to show their age (who writes Perl nowadays, besides me?) so I had to do some rewrites. Also I didn’t manage to get my hacks for including a RSS feed “dynamically” working (having curl download the RSS and running a Perl script to output HTML for dynamic include), so I had to rewrite that (into a Python script that writes the HTML to include to disk, and include it statically instead). Still very Web 1.0, but that’s how I like it.

I also moved my email to the new host, so now it is hosted in Norway (outside the reach of FRA, perhaps, but now the Norwegians can spy on me instead). They didn’t support Procmail, so I had to learn to configure Sieve instead. Fortunately I didn’t really need all that complicated Procmail stuff to just sort my mailing lists, and it was time to clean up anyway.

I’m very happy with Nordhost. My next project is moving this site over to them, and to stop using Dreamhost before the next bi-yearly billing cycle, mostly for economic reasons. They finally figured out that they do need to charge Norwegian VAT (25%), and that the US dollar is about twice as expensive now compared to when I set up hosting there fifteen years ago.