Two years ago, I moved this blog from Typepad, a blog hosting service I used for over a decade but who didn’t deliver value for money anymore to a web hosting provider and WordPress as a publishing platform. Now, it was time to move once again, for different reasons, however, from a web hoster to a virtual machine.
Not that it would have been absolutely necessary but I like to do as many things as possible when it comes to my infrastructure. So I decided to take the next step and move my WordPress installation into a virtual machine hosted by Hetzner, a cloud service provider in Germany. In addition to control over WordPress, I’m now also in control of the server itself to a certain degree, remember, it’s still a hosted VM, and, of course, over the web server. Yes, the cool kids probably use nginx these days but since I know my way around reasonably well in Apache, I decided to stick with that.
Unlike two years ago, when the exercise was quite painful as the blog hosting service (Typepad) did not offer a way to migrate easily, the latest move only took two hours. I regularly take backups of my WordPress installation and the Mysql database of the system, so applying that on a VM after installing Apache only took around half an hour. Once everything was setup up and working to my liking, which took around 2 hours in total, I switched the DNS entry and things were done.
So I’ve moved down the software stack one more step once again. Improvements are always possible, e.g. I could host the blog on a virtual machine at home rather than at a cloud provider. I wouldn’t save any money though as I need that cloud hosted VM for other purposes as well. Also, as my DSL line at home is probably not as stable as a VM at a cloud provider, I would loose some reliability and uptime. I’m not quite prepared yet to do that trade, however.