Today saw the completion of our biggest ever server upgrade. This will allow us a lot ore room for expansion, along with faster, smoother sites, and easier day-to-day management. However we are sad to be saying goodbye to our trusty upstream provider Bytemark. We had our first Bytemark server back in 2006 and as a company Bytemark has served us well, ever since.
Bytemark was taken over by Iomark, and is no longer actively supporting the “dedicated host” type machine that we have enjoyed for all these years. However, thanks to a very helpful chap at Iomark, I have been able to secure a deal from one of it’s Iomark “sister companies”, Rapidswitch. This deal allowed us a smooth transition period to a new dedicated Debian Linux host. It enabled us to move all sites and services across from the old Bytemark machine to a new one hosted by our new upstream provider, one-by one, testing each one before moving the next one. In addition to allowing a relatively smooth and orderly transition, this deal has also provided us with a dedicated machine with significantly higher specification than the old one.
Most sites moved across very smoothly with only a few minutes downtime whilst the planet’s DNS system caught up with the various nameserver changes. However, some sites suffered slightly longer delays due to an issue that to be frank, I had not really made sufficient allowance for. The new server runs latest Debian stable c/w latest PHP. The old server was running Debian “old stable” c/w PHP 7.4. This meant that some older WordPress plugins had stopped working because they have not been updated to PHP 8.*. So it was necessary to remove these plugins, and where necessary, find more modern replacements. Anyway, after a little scratching around, all the issues arsing from this nave now been resolved.
The performance of this new Rapidswitch server is quite impressive. And its 64GB RAM should ensure we don’t have any “out of memory” errors any time soon. So all-in-all, despite the upheaval I would say this has been a good move for us, and will certainly leave us better placed to deal with the technological challenges the future will inevitably bring.