Daily archives of “March 7, 2015

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To The Clouds We Go!

Google's datacenter, lit by thousands of blue LEDs from the servers' status panels.
Google’s datacenter, lit by thousands of blue LEDs from the servers’ status panels.

I’ve been messing around with my WordPress installation somewhat in the past few weeks, and I did that while I was gawking at the prospect of getting into the Game of Clouds. You see, the thought of having my own VPS for me to tinker with has refused to leave my mind these past few months.

Then the unthinkable happened: I deactivated my JetPack plugin, only to realize that I couldn’t reactivate it because the hosting company blocked access to xmlrpc.php. I began emailing the administrator, almost begging for him to open up access to my xmlrpc.php if only for a short while. But nothing happened. I guess he and the admins before his time put way too much security checks to really prevent xmlrpc.php to be accessed.

Eureka!

I thought this was my chance to migrate, because I never did have a good enough reason to do it in the past. The cheapest option I can find (shoutout to you good people at DigitalOcean.com) still costs more than four times my current service subscription, but I eventually decided that the benefits would outweigh the cost by n-fold. This is because moving into the cloud allows me to spawn (and kill) any server configurations as I like, and have root access (with reasonable security measures in place, of course) to do anything I could possibly want (even wipe out my entire filesystem if I was stupid enough).

So, this day marks the day I officially move to DigitalOcean’s cloud. The move was rather reckless, and I killed my own blog site for a few days in the process, but the experience was worth it.

To the clouds we go!

PS: I’ll be publishing the migration process within a few days. If that kind of stuff is right up your alley, please stay tuned 🙂

PPS: Even though I complain about xmlrpc.php being blocked on my previous subscription, I do know that it is for the good of everybody who paid to be on that shared hosting server. If you’re wondering how xmlrpc.php could use your site (and thousands like it, together) to bring down another server without you ever knowing anything about it, here‘s a good read.