Back around the beginning of March, the box this blog (and lots of other things) is hosted on failed, and I got it back up by removing one of the CPUs. Since that time, I bought some replacement hardware, and have had it 90% set up for about a month here. But I haven’t quite figured out how to make the transition to the state where everything is running on the new box without another week of downtime. Ideally I’d like to have both boxes on a rack somewhere so I can shut down the domU (guest domains) on the first box, rsync everything over, and bring them up on the new host, and then change the DNS entries.
One of the reasons I’m holding off on doing this is that my hosting site charged me $105 just for the privilege of taking my box off the rack and putting it back, and both operations took them *hours* to accomplish, mostly because their business office is the other side of town from where the rack is. And they don’t let you visit the rack yourself.
There is a second hosting company in town, and they advertise lower prices than I’m paying at my current host, and they say “If you want a site tour, let us know”. They also seem to have their rack space in the same building as their business office, so I have hopes that they wouldn’t be able to rack the box in less than 12 hours. So I’ve let them know that I want a tour. Twice. The first time, they ignored me. The second time, somebody contacted me to say he was out of town the next week, but he’d have somebody else contact me, and that person never did. So I’m pretty much ready to give up on them. Which is too bad, because that would be ideal – I’d rack the box, do the rsyncs, move the DNS entries over, and when it appeared everything was working, cancel my contract with the old place.
So now I guess my option is to ask the old guys how much they’d charge me for a couple of weeks of having two machines on the rack with 4 more IPs. I’m betting it’s more than the $105 they charged me to unrack and rack my box last time.