I’ve decided to host this site on a hosted VPS instead of a Raspberry Pi 2 from home (I’m still working on getting the CSS sorted, finalising the config and uploading older posts.)
There are two reasons for this, the first is practical: I keep shutting the pi down. Although I suspect nobody noticed, I hate downtime as much as the next guy.
We’re doing lots of decorating at the moment which involves moving furniture around regularly. We’re pretty much redoing everything in this house, with the exception of knocking down/building walls (although we are doing some construction work on the chimney & fireplace). As a result, we’re finding that we have to empty a room, prepare and paint it, then use it to store things from another room whilst we do that room, then move things around again for the next step… repeat for every room. We end up with us moving rooms several times, and each time I move the IT it knocks the site offline for a while until I get the time to bring it back up.
The second reason for switching to a dedicated hosting company is that our internet sucks. I mean seriously, it’s so bad. And I think it’s getting worse. If we’re lucky, we get about 0.2mb/s upload. This is fine for a simple site – I had offloaded images and other large files to cache.fyr.io already to alleviate the issue. However, we have recently noticed that the upload is incredibly touchy. Normally you’d expect to get, say, 15KB/s upload consistently. We’re instead seeing 15KB/s for a brief moment, then nothing for a few seconds, followed by a short burst of upload, nothing, upload… this may be a latency thing but I’ve not really had any latency issues that would explain this away. The end result is a slowly loading website that occasionally just stops loading part way through. Not great.
These two issues have caused me to bite the bullet and move over to WordPress on Gandi. I’ve not really used WordPress recently, though I did use it a fair bit years ago whilst testing CMS’s for work (we went with Drupal back when 7 had just released.)
I have kept ip.fyr.io on the Pi2 though – the bandwidth issues don’t really affect that, and I suspect I’ll add more tools to it in the future. The Pi is still being used!
Hopefully this will result in a better experience for any readers. The previous website was custom-built with PHP, only basic features and nothing I would publish but it got the job done. Now I have a lot more tools at my disposal (WYSIWYG editors are taken for granted) that should enable more frequent updates as well as a nicer experience for readers. For example, I’ve left comments enabled, which something I wanted to add to the previous site myself but knew what a minefield that would be to do correctly.
Expect some changes to the site as and when I get time to update it. If you do have any issues, forcing a reload may be your best bet (hold CTRL, push F5) but if that doesn’t work odds are I’ve broken something.
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