My old (and current) server will start the next billing period on the 23rd. I need to give two day’s notice to cancel, which means, as I understand it, today (Thursday the 21st) is the last opportunity for me put in a cancellation notice. I intend to do so in the afternoon.

The plan is that I’ll deploy the shiny new Debian VM image Andrew got working on the new server in the morning, set it up to do DNS, update the domain records, make a full backup of the old system, and then request an “End of billing period cancellation,” which should mean that the old/current server will stay online through the 23rd, giving me two whole days to get the new one working, which should be something I can do in an afternoon. I suspect that DNS may become a major headache, though.

This is the only way to avoid paying for another month on a server that’s now very old and outdated, yet suddenly more expensive as my hosting company thought that they should give more than a 50% increase in costs to their long-term customers. The way I’m doing he move is hardly the ideal way to do it, but it’s the, “I’m not paying $86 for another month” way of doing it. This method has some risks, though:

• In theory, the cancellation should be an “End of billing period” cancellation, meaning that when I submit the cancellation order on the 21st, it’ll go dark on the 23rd. In practice, they may pull it earlier. (Which I’ll fight, but it’ll still be down…)
• The new DNS records may point people to the new server before the kinks are worked out. If the blogs are suddenly a default Apache “It works!” page, don’t fret. (Again, it’s poor practice to ever have DNS records pointing to servers before they’re ready, much less tested. But unless preventing this is worth $86 to anyone, it’s a risk I’m taking.)
• The old DNS records may not time out as quickly as they should, meaning that the new server is up and running well and life is peachy, but some clients may still be trying to connect to the old server after it’s offline.
• The new server might not be up before the old one is taken offline, in which case DNS doesn’t matter either way because neither instance of the site would work at the moment.
• Things could go better than expected, and the new server comes up tomorrow afternoon/evening, and the old server stays online until the 23rd. But some clients may get the old IP while others get the new one, resulting in major headaches trying to keep the data synced so that people see the same content.

I’m making a full backup before starting anything, and then I’m copying data directly to the new server, so existing content will actually be safer than ever. (As it will reside on three different disks.) However, there’s a decent chance that the sites hosted here will be unreachable at some point between now and the weekend, and there’s an even greater chance that anything posted between now and then will reside only on the server being decommissioned. If all goes according to plan, I can manually sync any new posts over, so it shouldn’t be a big deal in any case, but things with computers rarely work as planned, so the short version is until further notice, don’t post anything here that you’d miss if it were irretrievably lost. (However, do feel free to post, just please don’t post a painstakingly-composed, heartfelt post without saving a copy on your computer.)