Gould.me.uk

So, I bought a new hard disk for my server recently. The intention was to expand the size of one of the zpools that is used for local backup replicas. It should have been an easy job, but easy jobs always have a way of going wrong…

I’d followed the same process that I had followed several times before, put the new drive in a spare bay, run the various tools you can to zero the drive out, write random data across it, zero it out again and so on. Everything was fine, no issues showing up, no performance anomalies to investigate. So I pushed the button to start the replacement in ZFS of the old drive with the newer larger one. Everything was still fine, the data all copied across, no downtime, no issues, zfs pool expanded, green lights across the board.

It’s funny how many things seem important in life at the time, but in the long run turn out to not really matter at all. The last time I edited this blog was back in 2021, almost exactly five years ago. It doesn’t seem like that long ago but things in life were very different then. In 2021 I only had one child, both my parents were alive, and I was not as far along in my career as I am now.

Spurred on by the matter of the disappearing VPS, I decided to try and go through all the things I have hosted somewhere online. It turns out that over time you can accumulate a lot of unnecessary cruft in the online world the same as you can in the real one.

I decided to start by reversing my age old practice of having registered various domain names with whoever the cheapest registrar was at the time. It turns out that what is saved on the cost of a domain itself is nowhere near enough to offset having manage multiple providers all of whom have different logins, portals, etc. It also made it different to do things like harmonise renewals to the same year which I wanted to do so I would receive fewer renewal e-mails.

So recently I found myself in the position where one of the websites I run got wiped from the face of the internet when the hosting provider deleted the VPS that it was running on.

Needless to say this was a somewhat irritating circumstance to find myself in. Whilst I did have recent backups (everyone should these days) this particular site was running on WordPress and as much as I like WordPress the thought of standing everything up from scratch on a new VM was not appealing. So I started looking at alternatives.