rob.rho.org.uk

A long while ago, when I first moved this domain to its own server¹, I went with ByteMark, on the basis of recommendations from a few people I knew and who’s opinion I trusted. This trust turned out to be well-founded, and I was a happy customer for a long while.

However, in 2018, they were acquired by IOMart. This was uneventful at first, but then prices started to creep up, and I started to hear grumblings from other customers about the service going downhill. However, I didn’t hit any problems myself (my needs are very simple), so inertia kept me where I was.

Things came to a head last February, which ByteMark (“An IOMart Company”) announced that they were shutting down BigV, the virtual hosting product I used, with three month’s notice. This put the wind up me and many of their other customers, and I started to look around for alternatives. Ultimately, on that occasion, they relented and kept the service going, but my confidence in them was gone. When they made a similar announcement again a few months ago, I pulled my finger out and actually started to move things.

After a brief search, I’ve gone with the strongly Cambridge-connected Mythic Beats, again on the basis of many personal recommendations. Not only has this cut my monthly bill in half, but I’ve so far been impressed with the service, the support, and the general ease with getting everything set up. As of this evening, all of my web, mail and DNS presence has been migrated over to a brand-new virtual server, and I can wind down the old one.

I’ve also used the opportunity to revisit and modernise my setup (some of the configuration was literally two decades old; time tested, but due a refresh). I’ll be following up with some more posts over the next few weeks, going over some of the highlights of what’s changed. Overall, though, it was a very straightforward process, and my only regret was not doing it sooner.

Update — Posts about the move:

• What’s In a Name?
• Moving to Caddy
• Self-host Your Email on the Modern Internet With This One Weird Trick