Sir-Toby.Com

As I mentioned a while back, I have been looking at alternative hosting options for Sir-Toby.Com. It has been a long while since I've mentioned anything because I haven't had a lot of time for this project and I haven't had much luck looking for hosting options that meet my requirements. About a week ago, my luck changed. A friend of mine who works for Verizon pointed out their Terremark vCloud Express product. I set up a test server there and have been playing with it. I believe that this is a viable hosting solution for Sir-Toby.Com.

Now that I've found a hosting solution that I'm happy with, I'm anxious to migrate over. My current aging server is making ever increasingly alarming noises and seems to be getting more prone to overheating, which was the cause of most of the Sir-Toby.Com outages this summer. Even with my strong desire to migrate, this process will still take some time. Sir-Toby.Com has a number of pieces that all fit together. I need to test the migration for all of these pieces and find fixes for anything that doesn't work. At the very least, I know that Extend-A-Story itself will need some minor changes to work with a new server. I will create a separate thread for following changes to Extend-A-Story.

Since this process will take some time, I will update this thread as things progress. There will be opportunities to test out things on my Terremark test server as I get some of the pieces working. I will announce when such opportunities come up. If you have suggestions for changes you would like to see on Sir-Toby.Com, now is a good time to make such suggestions since a migration like this provides a good opportunity to make improvements.

Thanks for the update.

Well... The last post in this thread was about 10 months ago. I have not forgotten about migrating Sir-Toby.Com to a new hosting provider. While it has been a long time, I do have an update on my progress. I am close to releasing an updated version of Extend-A-Story that will work with my new hosting provider. You can follow the progress on the new version of Extend-A-Story in this thread. Once I release the new version of Extend-A-Story, I will deploy a test story to my new hosting provider and open it up for testing. I will continue to update this thread with my progress.

Thanks, Jeff.

I second that motion!

Thanks, Jeff!

I have started work on another process: migrating the Sir-Toby.Com domain to a different domain registrar. This is primarily to simplify my life since I have a number of other domains registered at another domain registrar and I want to manage all of my domains in one place.

If everything goes smoothly, you shouldn't see any problems with Sir-Toby.Com during this migration. If things go wrong, Sir-Toby.Com may be down while I figure out what went wrong. If this happens, you can use my GMail email address to check with me on the site status: jjweston@gmail.com

This process will require several steps and I'll need to wait a fair amount of time between each step. I'll keep this thread updated with my progress.

The first step will be to update the Sir-Toby.Com domain to use a DNS provider rather than hosting my own DNS server as I have been doing for years. I just finished setting up all of the DNS records for Sir-Toby.Com with this new provider. I will wait a day or so for things to settle down and then I will update the Sir-Toby.Com domain to use the new DNS provider.

I just updated the Sir-Toby.Com domain to use my new DNS provider. I was told that this change may take from 24 to 48 hours to update throughout the Internet.

Just pinged www.sir-toby.com and it resolved to 69.30.73.224. I assume that that must be the new IP address, or I wouldn't have been able to find the site with my browser.

JH wrote:Just pinged www.sir-toby.com and it resolved to 69.30.73.224. I assume that that must be the new IP address, or I wouldn't have been able to find the site with my browser.

The IP address of Sir-Toby.Com hasn't changed, only the DNS servers. The IP address shouldn't change until I migrate the Sir-Toby.Com web site to my new hosting provider.

If you are curious, you can see the name servers for Sir-Toby.Com using a whois search, or with the 'dig' Unix command.

These are the old Sir-Toby.Com name servers:
ns1.sir-toby.com
ns1.antiform.com

These are the new Sir-Toby.Com name servers:
ns.phx6.nearlyfreespeech.net
ns.phx7.nearlyfreespeech.net

I have started the domain transfer of the Sir-Toby.Com domain from my old domain registrar to my new domain registrar. This process may take several days. If everything goes smoothly, you should see no changes in the Sir-Toby.Com web site. The IP address and DNS servers are not changing as part of this step of migrating the Sir-Toby.Com domain to a new registrar.

The domain transfer has completed successfully with no issues that I am aware of.

Sir Toby wrote:The domain transfer has completed successfully with no issues that I am aware of.

Good.

I have installed a test story on my new hosting provider so that people can poke at it and make sure that everything seems to be working. My initial tests look good, but I'd like to make sure that I haven't missed anything.

This is the URL: [URL Removed]

Episode notifications will come from this email address: [Email Removed]

Be sure to check your spam folder if you do not receive episode notifications. You may need to add [Email Removed] to your address book to ensure that episode notifications are not marked as spam.


Edit: The test story has been removed, so I removed links and emails that are no longer relevant.

I've seen a few people poke at the test story. Everything appears to be working, so I'll proceed with making final preparations for migrating Sir-Toby.Com to my new hosting provider. I don't have a timeline for when this migration will occur yet. I will post again when I know more. In the meantime, I will leave the test story up for a while longer so that people can continue to poke at it if they want.

I have taken down the test story in preparation for the migration to the new hosting provider. I will post more details here when I am ready to announce final plans for the migration.