I recently moved this site. It’s still at rumored dot com, of course. And it’s hopefully somewhat of an invisible transition. But it was pulling teeth there for a bit. Let me explain.
I first registered this domain on November 16, 1998. Prior to that, this blog (which wasn’t called a blog yet, because that term barely existed) lived over at Speakeasy, the hosting provider that was previously an internet cafe in Seattle. In 1998, I registered for a hosting account at Pair dot com, probably because Michael was using them for his site. I also registered the domain rumored dot com. The site went through various iterations of a static site, eventually using a static site generator I wrote before static site generators were A Big Thing, and then eventually it ended up in self-hosted WordPress.
That was going okay for decades I guess. I’d get a big bill every November, I’d pay it, and I’d have somewhat average service for the next 12 months. Pair was never blindingly fast or very leading-edge on their offering, but it worked reliably, and there was little fuss. Using some new wiz-bang hosting thing like Vercel or whatever would give me one-click whatever and the latest stacks and toys and apps and whatnot. But for just straight-up Apache/PHP/MySQL and no complications, Pair worked.
For a while, this was slightly frustrating because I was working with Ruby on Rails, then learning way more PHP, and I had grandiose ideas of doing the Next Big Multimedia Thing somehow, writing a database-backed CMS that had some weird image component or collaborative wiki something-or-other. And I’d write Rails stuff on my home machine and then not really have a way to deploy it to Pair. Or I’d come up with some PHP behemoth and then copy it over, and it would constantly time out on their machines. I gave up on that eventually. WordPress more or less worked. I thought about moving to Ghost or some real CCMS system, but once you get well past a thousand entries into a WordPress blog, moving it elsewhere is like moving houses when you have more than 20,000 books. You can’t do it on a whim.
So life went on. And then this year, my annual bill went up like 75%, to $455, and was promptly autocharged to my card without me thinking about it. My fault for not paying attention, I guess. But then I went to dig into exactly which plan I had, and it turns out I was grandfathered into an ancient plan that didn’t exist anymore, and was stuck on some old hosting system or something. Like I was paying something like $42 a month, and a $5.99 a month plan on their pricing page touted like ten times the disk space and bandwidth I was throttled down to. Also, $42 a month isn’t your annual bill. These are GrubHub prices; order a $5 hamburger and a $5 drink, and your total after all the chickenshit fees is $47.
Pair used to be a great independent company, and they got bought and then sold and bought again, and they’re now owned by some Dutch company who has an About Us page that looks like it was written by ChatGPT. My billing inquiry was answered accordingly, and instead of any attempt to work with me or give me a slight discount, I got a big cut and paste of a press release or something, and was informed I could move my stuff to another hosting system, which see above about moving a giant site. And why should I reward this place with my business for running in this fashion?
I told S about this and she mentioned working on a marketing project for a large bank who shall go unnamed (they have “of America” in there somewhere) and when she asked why people would stay even thought they planned on screwing up rates and terms, the bank’s one-word answer was “inertia.” I felt the same way when a savings account I had for twenty years was suddenly paying a fifth the interest as an account that any new customer would get. In that case, I just opened a second account and moved my money over. But that didn’t involve a maze of redirected URLs, byzantine scripts I wrote ten years ago and have completely forgotten about, and a gigantic MySQL database.
Anyway. I looked at my options, and chose the path of least resistance. I went over to AWS and spun up a Lightsail WordPress instance with something like 40x as much disk space and who knows how much faster for $7 a month, and the first three months were free. I exported the old WP instance, imported it to the new one, and after maybe a few hours of futzing, I had it more or less working the same. So I pointed the domain to the new one, and that’s that.
There are a few things that did not make the move, which is fine. I had a bunch of loose pages outside of WordPress for books that aren’t even published anymore, and those are gone. The old Paragraph Line web site that has zero traffic is dust. I think there are some little theme-based things that may be off, but it’s all mostly fine. HTTPS was a brief bump in the road, but it’s now working. The Lighthouse score is about 5 higher, and the rest of that is the fault of WordPress. And if I ever decide I need another site or a CDN or any of the other 863 things AWS does, it’s a click or three away.
There is some nostalgic thing about walking away from something you’ve used daily for 27 years. The Pair account reminds me of the start of my writing in Seattle, and all the years I blogged in New York, and the various book sites and other schemes I ran from that host. It makes me reminisce about the era when PHP was king and I was struggling to learn more about it. It was a constant through many moves and cities and eras and lifetimes. But, it’s just a host, I guess. I’m still sitting at a Bash prompt when I ssh to the new place. I’m still typing into the same WordPress editor as I write this. Everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.
Anyway. I’m out that $455, which is stupid. If I get time, I’ll start doing more new stuff with the new hosting, maybe. Or maybe I’ll start actually posting here more next year.