Ever since this website came online, I’ve been paying a company for a basic hosting package on Canadian servers. Initially I was on a shared server, which is dirt cheap but unreliable (because you’re splitting bandwidth and computation among a number of unrelated websites). Later I moved to a Virtual Private Server (which comes with dedicated resources). On top of that I opted for cPanel, a web-based administration tool that allows you to manage your website’s services and files remotely through a convenient interface.

The combination of VPS and cPanel worked well for many years, but there was a hitch. Sure, the VPS came at a reasonable cost of $10 CAD a month (even that’s a little pricey, but that’s for a slightly higher tier of storage and bandwidth). But cPanel is a rip-off, at least for an itty bitty server like mine. In recent years it was $28 a month. That constantly irked me, but I was too lazy to do anything about it. Then, earlier this year, the price went up to $35 (or possibly $40?) a month. After tax, I’d end up paying over $50 a month for web hosting, which is completely absurd. I knew it was time to make a switch.

Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve ditched cPanel. This turned out to be a non-trivial process. My hosting company can’t just switch off cPanel on my existing server and leave everything else as-is: they had to migrate me to a fresh VPS. They handed me the keys to this new server last week so I could poke around and start customizing it for my needs.

I haven’t done any Linux system administration for a good long while. Even though I’m pretty comfortable on the command line, I knew I’d want the support of some sort of web-based control panel. After looking around at the free alternatives to cPanel, I settled on virtualmin (which has a paid tier, but the basic installation is more than enough for my needs).

Installing virtualmin was far from trivial. The problem is that, like most control panel systems, it wants to be the first thing you install so that it can control everything on your behalf. But my hosting company had already set up a basic software stack to serve web pages and DNS, and I didn’t want to throw that away. So after trying to cram virtualmin onto the server anyway, I was left with a fairly janky configuration. It took a lot of web searching, fiddling around, getting some support from my hosting company, and a few forum posts, but I think everything is working now. (Well, not quite—the outside world doesn’t trust my mail server, so test messages I send get tossed away as spam. Something to keep tweaking, I guess.) Interestingly, virtualmin claims to be able to restore a virtual server from a cPanel backup. So in the end, it might have been better had my hosting company not migrated my old server for me: I could have installed virtualmin first, and then simply restored everything else. Oh well, I’ll know for next time. In the meantime, I’m back down to a quite reasonable $10 a month.

I have a backlog of a few things I’d like to write up as blog posts here. Now that the dust has settled on migration, hopefully I’ll be able to get to some of them during the summer. The performance of the website feels a little zippier overall, so perhaps that’ll act as a bit of an incentive to add to it.