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.

Good to know.

I agree with Tom about docker being too much for a pretty straightforward application.

Fair enough. Just where my headspace is right now.

Anyone know what this might be about?

Hello,

We hope you're enjoying your DreamHost account!

We've noticed some content on your account that might run afoul of our Acceptable Use Policy and wanted to draw your attention to it: 321G "ps189917:/home/buff_org/buffistas.org/phoenix/www.buffistas.org/logs" 247G "ps189917:/home/buff_org/buffistas.org/phoenix/buffistas.org/logs"

The storage on our servers is designed specifically for hosting websites and their associated content. It's not well suited to being used as a backup solution or other general-use storage solution. That can include (but is not limited to!) using the web server as method of delivering files not intended for website use.

The bad news is that we have to ask you to delete this content from your server within the next seven days (by the end of February 5, 2018). The good news is that we offer a service, DreamObjects, that's custom-built for storing large amounts of data like backups and other large archives.

You can learn more about DreamObjects here: [link] [link]

As a reference, please see our Acceptable Use and Unlimited storage policies in our terms of service:

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Unfortunately, we cannot allow the data we cited above to continue to live on your current web service. We'd prefer that you move the data off yourself at a time that's convenient for you, but if you take no action we will delete the data above in seven days. Please let us know what you plan to do. Please note, we will try our best to ensure your data is not deleted before the date listed above, and your reply is appreciated.

If you feel that we're wrong about your content (hey, it happens!), please contact us with details so that we can investigate the matter for you and take appropriate action.

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Thanks! Elizabeth

We need to delete the logs because they is huge.

They can really grow to ridiculous sizes! (like what happens to my storage unit)