Rings a bell.

What would people think of moving hosting from dreamhost to digitalocean? They recently lowered the price of their VMs so a $10 a month VM would probably be plenty. A $5 a month VM might even be enough.

I think it would make things a bit easier from a technical matter. Partly because I'd kinda like to change the database to PostgreSQL from MySQL for reasons. I'm also thinking of using Rails instead of PHP for the backend because there is a lot more security baked in with Rails. Without realizing it, I've structured the PHP to be an awful lot a Rails app already and it makes me think I might as well go Rails and get those baked-in features.

I'm a big fan of both DO and Rails.

I don't know enough about our specific challenges (seriously, one of these days I'll actually dig in to the codebase, I promise!) to have a lot of opinions on how those apply, but I trust Gud on that part, like, a lot.

Postgresql is appealing since it has full text search support in the database.

Rails just does a lot of really nice stuff automatically in terms of security and having database migrations would be really nice if we need to change the schema at some point. Oh, and asset management too.

My PHP code plugs the weak hashing and SQL injection vulnerabilities, but I still need to harden post requests and a few other things that Rails just does.

When I say my PHP code looks a lot like rails, I mean seriously similar. A have a file will all the routes, I have controllers, I have models, I have views (twig templates), I have database connections defined in yml. I am basically writing a rails app in PHP.

What would people think of moving hosting from dreamhost to digitalocean?

If the platform is easier for the person/people maintaining the board then it makes sense to me. We have had pretty good experience with dreamhost, I think. Really I am okay with whatever people with more information have to say.

I think Liese might be the person who's been under the hood most recently?

I can see lots of pluses in moving to Digital Ocean / VPS - customizability and control being the big ones obviously. My one worry would be that with control also comes responsibility, and maintaining a VPS requires a bit more hands-on action than maintaining a dreamhost web account. Do we have enough unix gurus on deck that if Gud has to go away for an extended period for some reason we'd be able to keep things up and running?

I feel like if we did move to DO, we'd probably want to set up some user-friendly interfacing options (cPanel-type thing, though I'm sure there are nicer fancier things around now) and of course regular backups. And possibly implement regular automatic updates (at least for minor versions) for things that could potentially develop security holes.

Pushing even further down the tech chain, is there any reason to consider putting the code into a docker container? And the database into a docker volume? This would make switching hosts in the future if we choose to do so remarkably easy, if nothing else...

Pushing even further down the tech chain, is there any reason to consider putting the code into a docker container? And the database into a docker volume?

Overkill. There's nothing so complicated about our code that it shouldn't be trivial to port it across hosts in the first place.

Oh, if you're going to be migrating the data from the current mysql database to postgresql: Before the PHP upgrade in 2016, text records were being inserted as windows-1252 (latin-1), but after the upgrade strings were UTF-8. Which is why you see ⬧'s all over the place here. (I selectively converted some records to utf-8 afterwards).

It might make the migration take a little longer, but it would probably be useful, as you're migrating the data, to check and see if a record is coded as windows-1252 or utf-8, and covert the latin-1 strings to utf-8.