“18 juillet 2018”

Almost 7 years. This is how long I kept this “notepad” running on the same server, before rush-migrating it away over the weekend (and mostly just yesterday).

Piwigo was a bit of a pain, I didn’t think upgrading PHP to 8.3 while still running Piwigo 12 would involve such a wall of errors, when WordPress on the other hand didn’t seem to even notice the change from whatever PHP was on that old Ubuntu 18 to the 8.3 that comes with Ubuntu 24, besides the fast that the warning about PHP being too old an “lacking security updates” (joke’s on them, I was using the ESM version) disappeared. So I had to rush to apply a manual update from version 12 to 15.5, instead of the planned semi-automatic update I was expecting to perform quietly in a few days.

But anyhow, wow, this was the first time I kept the same server for so long. And it would have been even longer if OVH hadn’t once again pushed me, this time not only by increasing the price but also by changing the VPS for what seemed like a slightly slower one. I wonder how longer I would have kept that one without that. At that point, I’d probably have aimed for the next LTS in spring/summer 2026. Still, new apartment, new job, new partner, new computer. That server outlived a lot.

It was 4.20€ a month (initially 3.60 I believe) for a “1 vCore” (whatever that fake core actually is, that’s the part I really hate about VPSes), 2 GB of RAM, 20 GB of disk space, 100Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. Actually not that bad. But not quite competitive either when at the same time they recently started offering a Xeon E5-1620v2 (4c/8t) with 32 GB of RAM and 120GB of disk (and 500Mbps symmetrical BW) for 12€. I was a bit concerned about the age of that CPU, but so far it seems blazing fast compared to the VPS. The race to squeeze always more cores into barely 100W sure results in electricity savings for hosting services, but for the customers who still have to pay the crappy cores one by one, the benefits aren’t as obvious…

Following the guide I had written to myself all that time ago was surprisingly easy overall. But this might be due to some updates I made to it in 2022, when I had already made an attempt to switch but ended up giving up for a reason that I can’t quite remember (possibly performance issues on the then-“new” replacement VPS with crappy cores, actually). Or maybe this was also thanks to the help of GPT-clones, which made it easy to fill in the blanks when some details were missing or had become inaccurate. These things are scarily useful. And they’re also one of the reasons why I don’t post here much anymore, as any data you put out there is, nowadays, more likely to be monetized by Skynet than to be read by some actual humans… Progress, eh…

Anyhow, today’s the last day the previous server is running… farewell old VPS and old Ubuntu. And also farewell Canada 👀