To have your own website, you need a domain and somewhere to put the files that appear when you type that domain into your web browser. It can get a little more involved than that, but there's loads of help available. There are thousands of options for your host - some free, many paid - but I have been with Gandi for years now. I always liked their No bullshit stance (which was also their slogan for a long time) - their tools worked, their services were good, pricing was reasonable. To be honest, two of the three are still true (in my experience), however the last, the pricing? It has gone up too much.

It all started back in 2019 when the Montefiore Investment purchased Gandi. Nothing actually happened, at least not from my perspective. Things stayed the same. I was surprised - from the moment the purchase was publicised I began considering my move away, but I waited until things took a turn. And they didn't! Confidence was shaken, however I only really had a few little projects and domains that weren't of much value to me personally. This site existed as a Wordpress blog, but I wasn't really too attached to it.

Then in February 2023, Total Webhosting Solutions acquired Gandi. They started to charge for their mailboxes, which was entirely acceptable - managing mailservers is a PITA at the best of times. I've done it, it wasn't the easiest thing to do in 2009, and I can't imagine it got easier in the decade-plus since.

But then they hiked the price of their domains, and their hosting, and it became a point of contention. I paid, but I didn't like it.

Then I needed to transfer a domain. One I owned on behalf of someone I know AFK, a transfer from one Gandi account to another. It went fine, but there was an issue with the mailbox payments. Despite not being on my account, my payment details were still being used - they had transferred with the mailbox instead of inheriting the payment details on the other persons account, and I couldn't take them off myself.

I contacted support and eventually got a short, rushed response which essentially blamed me for this (which, okay, maybe I was supposed to remove payment details from the account prior to moving a domain?) and then just told me to talk to the new owner, and closed the support ticket. It wasn't exactly a bad experience, but it was kinda... bullshit?

No bullshit, yeah, right.

So anyway, I finally did what I've known I've needed to do for over two years now and migrated to something else. Something better.

No longer am I on a wierd mid-point between a VPS and a shared web host (which, honestly, worked fine for me) - I have a "Proper VPS" with Hetzner, and it costs like €4 a month. I've still got most of my domains on Gandi, but I have tried porkbun, which was nice, though I'm going to look for an EU registrar at some point.

The migration of files worked a treat - previously I would need to SFTP the fyr.io site files over when things changed, which I didn't mind. It's kinda oldschool, and as you can probably tell from my content I'm a fan of the older web, warts 'n' all. Now however I am taking advantage of Gitlab pipelines to push changes here whenever the main repository is updated. It's way more hands off, which I do appreciate.

And, thankfully, the site worked right away - everything pulled over fine and picked up right from the repo, no data loss as far as I can tell.

There were a couple minor things though...

• The site didn't have SSL for about an hour, as I had to wait for the DNS changes to propagate before certbot could validate the domain. Easy fix, just had an exercise in patience. I'm sure the three people that look at this site occasionally didn't notice anything.
• More annoyingly however, the following day I got dozens of notifications on my RSS feed reader app indicating that all my posts on here were unread. I still haven't figured out why that happened, as far as I can see everything is the same! If you are subscribed to my RSS feed and got hit with this, I apologise.
• I also had an issue with the /void content - it didn't come across, a victim of the .gitignore preventing changes to the required files. Because I'm not too shabby at this whole computer thing^{(citation needed)}, I had up to date backups, so it was easy to pull the new file and change things around to let it work with gitlab runners rather than my manual SFTP process. An easy fix.
• Last up, I had an email from someone who had scanned the domain with a vuln scanner during the migration, picking up on some poor SSH algorithms that were in use. I hadn't had a chance to check that out since spinning up the VPS, so that was great! It's not too big of a deal, but it is now fixed and they have been credited on the /vulns Hall of Fame - Thanks for emailing, Gaurang!

So, what's next?

Well I'm not too sure. I want to resume my scraps when I have more time in the week to stay on top of the indieweb and fediverse goings-on. I've also found myself playing more video games recently, my way of switching off. I'm getting in maybe half a dozen hours a week which is pretty decent for me. Maybe I should write mini reviews or something, though I only really play old games. My laptop can't run much that came out after 2020, and I've not spent any money on games in years.

Other than that, I'll start tinkering with the site and some of those projects you have on the backburner for years. You know the ones. We've all got them. Oh, actually, one thing I do need to do is migrate some other fyr and non-fyr stuff across to Hetzner... I should do that before I need to renew my other Gandi VPS.

If anyone has recommendations on an EU-based registrar, or notices a problem with this site, hit me up!