So we’re moving servers again. We’ve done this almost every year. I used a personal server first – Webmasters, which was really good in like . . . 2008. In 2010 or so, when we started SNAFU in to the Webmasters servers, they were kind of okay and on their way downhill. After the 2010 con, I moved from my personal Webmasters server to buy SCIENCE its own Webmasters space. This caused the fall outage of the forums in 2010 which effectively killed it. The forums have never recovered fully.

Webmasters is the reason that in 2011 and 2012 the webpage would go out every night at about 1am, and randomly drop at other times. They claimed no downtime, but we all knew better.

In late 2011 and early 2012 I started developing a strong admin team which knew much more than I did about webhosting. I could only tell this group that Webmasters used to be good. It was now pretty terrible. Webmasters finally pissed off the admin group enough that at the end of 2012 we moved to Amazon. Amazon had 1 year free and I was told it would cost us $120/year or $10/month which was the same as Webmasters. So whhhy not?

My amazing webmaster admin people set up Amazon. It took a little while, and we’re STILL trying to get everyone’s emails set up, but all-in-all it’s been a great move.

Then in November 2013, or so, I started seeing $30-ish charges. . . . Uhm. That’s not $120/yr. That’s $360/year and going up to $450/yr depending on the month (charges varied).

After some exploring, it was determined that we could get it as low as like $20/mo with Amazon if we paid for a year. Okay. Well, that’s not what I was told last year, but okay of that’s what we need to do. There was some aspect of the charging that was overlooked by the admin initially. So, they started looking for a new server to move to that was comparable to what we were actually using on Amazon. Nothing really surfaced immediately.

Last night (2/4) Thomas found a service VPSDime which looks like it’s our answer. So I paid for a month ($7) and we’re going to see if it works for us. If it does, then we cancel Amazon.

It will be an easier move and shouldn’t require everyone to set up their email again. In fact, no one should notice at all, AFAIK. But it is one more thing that absolutely has to be completed before we open registration for 2014 since it will likely take the site down temporarily if/when we actually switch over to the new server