Published by marco on
After 16 years hosted at Encodo Systems, earthli has moved from an Ubuntu VM to Web Hosting at HostFactory.
The move went very smoothly, although there are always a bunch of things to remember, especially when you haven’t changed servers for a long time—and especially when changing from a dedicated VM/server to shared web hosting. Thankfully, web hosting is a great fit for earthli because a dedicated server is quite expensive, starting at about CHF35.-/month. I took a look at cloud-based solutions and they very quickly rose into the same ballpark.
Hostfactory offers:
scp
for upload/download and shell access for stuff like mysql
or moving files)What does earthli.com need?
earthli-webcore
and earthli.com
repos for easy deployment.htaccess
support (for securing folders)What has changed?
data.earthli.com
[1] is no longer available. Use www.earthli.com/data
insteaddev.earthli.com
[2] is no longer available. Use www.earthli.com
instead.Are there any drawbacks to HostFactory? No, not really.
Getting used to a hosted environment was a good learning experience. I no longer have full control of the server, but I also no longer have full responsibility for setting everything up in a secure manner. PHP is set up to run more efficiently, with caching, and with maximal security (using Fast-CGI now instead of Apache modules). I have control over most PHP settings I need, but had to contact support to have them set my include_path
for me.
They do a great job of that, including a WAF (Web Application Firewall), which has some pretty aggressive rules. For example, I tried to post an update to an article that had the word “sexual” in it and was rejected. I contacted support and was told about an IP-white-listing feature. After white-listing myself, it worked immediately.
This is fine, but I worried about how well the solution scales. After a quick discussion with support, it turns out that the (non-security-relevant) rules can be individually tuned, should that be necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary yet, but it’s good to know that it’s an option if IP-white-listing proves to be insufficient for my needs.
So far, so good! 👍
Rewrite
rule to redirect to the new location. I didn’t do that because I’m not really interested in people continuing to use that sub-domain to access data.↩