On Fri 13th March I got this email from scoophost.com

It looks like it's time to decommission this hardware. We'll be migrating  clients accounts off it over the next few weeks. Our new infrastructure will not include virtual servers, so I wanted to let you know with as much notice as possible.

I was a bit confused by this, would they carry on hosting HuSi or not? So I asked for clarification.

The agreement from 2005 was that your one time payment would pay for hosting for the life of the hardware. At this point it's had a motherboard replacement, CPU and RAM replacements and now it's having SCSI bus problems so the decision has been made to decommission it. The regular clients (all with relatively small sites, using the standard codebase) will be moved to our other servers but at this point we don't have capacity to dedicate a  box or deploy a vserver for your site on the other servers. I can certainly help you move the site to any virtual server or dedicated server provider you select.

Fair enough. We've had a really good deal over the last four year. We paid about £1300 at the end of 2004. Split over 4 years, with no traffic costs or further payments to scoophost we've had a great deal.

I''d have prefered a bit more notice, but when hardware starts to go, there's not a lot you can do.

So I posted a call for help to the site, and got a huge response from lots of great people offering help to host the site.

Then the old machine died. Looks like the SCSI controller gave up the ghost.

The absent crispyduck saw my call for help on twitter and since she runs a hosting company with her partner, offered a great deal on a fantastic virtual machine. So I snapped her hand off ;)

The new machine

So we've got a new machine, courtesy of Blue Room Hosting. It's really quick, with loads of disk space and enough memory to run the bloated monstrosity that scoop is.

I've got scoop running on it now, but some things don't seem to work right yet. The spellchecker isn't working. This is all down to me not installing things right yet.

The missing stuff

scoophost are trying to get the data back from the broken machine.

There is some stuff that I'd missed from the backup scripts.

As some of the backups were corrupt, there are some stories missing. The wiki is gone (it's never been backed up). Some of my handy scripts are gone. Hopefully we'll get it back eventually.

I've not finished setting up email yet. So none of the hulver.com addresses are working at the moment.

Google adverts

Also missing is my story about my removing google adverts. Google are changing the way they serve adverts, and they're not giving site owners any choice in opting out of the new behaviour, so I've removed them from the site.

Costs

I'm now going to have to pay a monthly cost for hosting the site. Thanks to some donations when the site first went down, we're covered for the first two months. I'm going to have to have a think about how to raise enough to cover some of the costs every month. We're not talking anything drastic. The site is still going to be around for quite some time, and you're not going to lose access to anything you've already got right now.

I'm open to ideas.

Update [2009-3-14 22:8:37 by hulver]: Just to lay it out. The monthly cost of the new server is £55.