Back online! Thank you!

So, the website is back online, with some changes! There might be some issues still on some random link or database references to the old hosting directory structure but I will fix them as soon as I spot them.

Hope you will receive an email from this 🙂

This is what happened on GoDaddy:

The hosting was a “shared hosting”, basically a WordPress instance and a shared folder to host some content (the packages). This is how it was born and how it stayed for quite some years. At the time it was “ok” but it went downhill over the years.

Unfortunately for GoDaddy users, being a shared hosting, you have no choice but click on some web page to get what you need. One of these needs is an SSL certificate.

Yesterday my credit card was billed more than 200 USD for an SSL certificate signed by GoDaddy. Since they sell certificates and control the platform, switching to Let’s Encrypt is not possible.

After the billing, I could see the new certificate, but the certificate was not pushed to the instance. After almost a day on the chat with random people that just told me to wait an hour without getting anything fixed, I was put into phone contact with the “shared hosting” services.

There I was told that they were aware of the problem, and that all customers on the same shared hosting (“legacy”, according to what they said) were impacted since the 30th of April (seriously??) and there was no fix yet.

You are forced to pay a stupid SSL certificate a lot, you get an issue, the certificate can’t be used, they don’t fix it and good bye. Their service is beyond ridiculous.

After some more chatting with support it seems that at least I can be refunded for the last renewal of the certificate, let’s see if this happens.

After this bit of history, back on the new hosting.

Dedicated hosting

The site is no longer hosted on GoDaddy, so now this time I picked up a dedicated sysmte where I have direct access to it and I can do much more than before. This has led me to being able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates and certbot for automated renewals, thus saving money as well.

Bandwidth is much more stable, so download times should be greatly improved, especially for me for uploading the packages. I was able to sync the ~100 GB of packages in just a few minutes.

Mirroring repositories

Having access to the system means that now there is also an RSYNC daemon running serving all the content of the /repos folder. You can sync a specific repository with a command like this:

rsync -crlpvz --progress --delete-after rsync://negativo17.org:/repos/nvidia local/path

I’ve also added the instructions on the /repos folder directly.

A big thank you

Thank you very much with all my heart for the round of donations received! This means a lot to me.

All the donations received on Paypal and the cheaper / more versatile hosting should be enough to keep this site alive for another couple of years!

What’s next?

I’m planning to add some more content (ARM packages) and maybe migrate to something else that is not WordPress. I was thinking about a wiki, probably MediaWiki to make it similar to the Arch wiki, which I found very clear and easy to read, if you have any preferences please let me know.

9 thoughts to “Back online! Thank you!”

  1. Since the switch to the new provider I’ve been noticing that the repo appears to be down most of the time. DNF times out trying to fetch the repo metadata. Any idea what is going on?

  2. Hi,

    There’s something funky going on with the site and the repos.

    If I try to load the site via https it gives me a time-out. It lover simple http though.

    I checked with “Down for Everyone or Just Me” and I get the same results. http – up , https – down

    The repos are also timing out.

    1. The damn PHP/Wordpress thing is killing the CPU of the system and triggering OOM.
      I’m trying to find some time to get rid of WordPress and just stick to Wikimedia or similar. In the meanwhile I’ve created a new dedicated server (4 times the size).

  3. I noticed that the Spotify repository could not be retrieved any more and started to investigate today. I am happy to see that you just switched web hosters and still offer the repository.

    A while ago I was with DomainFactory and got tired of their service. They also had this issue with selling expensive SSL certificates. I spend 4 EUR/month with them. Then I moved to Manitu and they charge 2,50 EUR/month, offer free certificates and enough web space to deploy my site easily.

    You were looking for alternatives for WordPress. I personally really like static website generators, I currently use Nikola. You can get an overview at staticgen.com.

    1. Thanks for the tips! I’m not happy with WordPress at all and PHP in general, I will look at your suggestions.

  4. Sent you a donation!

    You do amazing work and have been responsive the few times I have reached out to you for help. I should have sent more and often.

    Even though I have been slowly moving towards another distribution, I will probably be back for I have been using Red Hat for 25 years.

    Best wishes and good health.

  5. I’m glad you joined the club of ex-GoDaddy users! For the website transition, you might look at building it with Django (if you want to go from scratch) or you could explore Drupal (if you want to stick with a CMS). As for the wiki, MediaWiki has been pretty good for my uses as an internal KB for user docs and support. You might take a look at an open source project called Tuleap which has MediaWiki and many other components you might like; and it’s built for RHEL/Centos https://docs.tuleap.org/installation-guide/full-installation.html

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