For the last five years, toroid.org has lived on a server
hosted at Hetzner.DE. It has
served me very well during that time (with a disk failure the only major
problem), but I have finally outgrown its modest hardware configuration
(Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB of RAM). The need for a more capable machine was
recently made very clear to me when the Yahoo crawler decided to index
archives.aox.org, and my machine
spent several days swapping things in and out (it worked fine, it was
just very slow and the other services suffered).
Two weeks ago, Hetzner's RP39 dedicated server plan (Athlon 64 X2 5600+,
2GB RAM, 2*400GB disk, for €39/month) caught my eye, and I wrote to
them to ask about upgrading to it. I had two important questions: could
I keep all my existing IP addresses? And could I order an RP39 server
with 4GB of RAM installed? Surprisingly, I received no response for a
week, despite sending two reminders. When I finally heard from them, I
was rather disappointed with the response.
No, I couldn't keep my primary IP address or my IPv6 /64 subnet. I could
move the IPv4 /29 subnet for €99 plus €15/month, which was as
good as not being able to keep it. No, I couldn't order an RP39 server
with 4GB of RAM because… it was no longer available! Sure enough, they
had removed RP39 from their order page before responding to my message.
The only sensible course of action available was to order an EQ4 server
(Intel i7-920, 8GB RAM, 2*750GB disk) for €149 plus €49/month,
accept that I would have different (and fewer) IP addresses, and migrate
data and services the hard way.
I spent a couple of days being disappointed about the disappearance of
RP39, but knew that Hetzner was within their rights to discontinue what
was always described as a limited "special offer". The EQ4 cost a little
more than I liked, and the migration would be painful, but I ordered one
on the 20th of August. Hetzner said they expected it to be online within
24 hours, which I took with a pinch of salt (it took three days for them
to bring up my old server). To my surprise, my shiny new EQ4 machine was
up and running within two and a half hours from the time of my order!
Now to complete the migration quickly…