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The move has not happened yet. I reverted back to the original host, because things are taking longer than I had expected. I have to figure out more things on my own over there and become even more expert in setting up a VPS. I will be working on getting the new server working with a less critical domain, make sure copies of this site can work with that domain, and then finally move this site when I have things working properly and I have a better handle on what I'm doing.

Thanks for your efforts on this.  Out of curiosity, what prompted the move?

I originally signed on with this host because of their affordable shared hosting. It was costing me nearly $50 / year for 250GB bandwidth / month, which was more than enough for the site's traffic. When they made me switch to a VPS, their least expensive plan cost $24.99 for 3 months and came with only 125GB bandwidth / month, which it turns out is not enough for the whole month. To get more bandwidth, the next least expensive plan is double the price and still provides only 200GB bandwidth, and their 300GB plan is triple the price. So, if I stay with this host, annual hosting costs could go from nearly $50 / year to nearly $200 or $300 / year, depending upon how much bandwidth I need. With the new host, I will have both a VPS account and available bandwidth measured in terabytes for closer to $50 or $60 / year, depending on how often I pay for it.

Wow, yeah, that's a huge difference.  Let me know if I can be of any help this weekend getting the new site set up.  It's not like I know a great deal about web server configuration but I know my way around Linux and can do research.

Since I'm not allowed to give root access to anyone else, I'll have to do much of it on my own, but I'll let you know if you can help. I'm working with CentOS 7, I just got webmin working with it, and I plan to get some DNS stuff going tomorrow. I was previously on CentOS 6, which was by mistake, since I had chosen 7. I then started over with CentOS 7, because that is what my present VPS is using, and I thought greater similarity with it would help. Also, I was having trouble getting MySQL and SSI to work. Since I'm doing this from scratch, and I have looked at articles on what to do after installing CentOS 7, I am looking into something called MariaDB. This is an opensource fork of MySQL that is supposed to be more efficient, which could help reduce the resources this site uses.

Yes, MariaDB is at least a marginal improvement on MySQL, and it's truly "open" so I think the chances are good that it will widen the gap over time.  Now that Oracle owns MySQL, some are concerned about it being taken in directions that benefit Orace at the expense of the interest of their users.  If this happens, the differences between MySQL and Maria will continue to increase, so it's probably best to do a migration earlier rather than later.

While reviewing available DNS programs, I found one created by Sam Trenholme called MaraDNS. It's on the same website he was using to host ChessV. If it's suitable, I thought it would cool to use that one, though I suppose the people providing tech support at my host will be unfamiliar with it.

Yeah, I knew Sam had a DNS program.  Good to see it's still available.  It would be great if we could use it.  I'm sure Sam would help us if we ran into trouble.

After looking it over, I think I'll pass on it. Although it would be cool to use something by a fellow CV inventor, it is not actively supported, it lacks DNSSEC, which he says is important for security but which he doesn't have the time to add to MaraDNS, I didn't find documentation on how to handle subdomains, and it is not widely used. Since I'm only just learning about DNS, I may just use BIND, which is already available through webmin.

Oh well.  Yeah, those all sound like good reasons - particuarly subdomains.  We kinda need that.

I think things are ready to go. I have been testing a copy of the website out on subdomains of duniho.org, and I have SSI, PHP, MariaDB (a MySQL replacement), and RedirectEngine all working. Since I will have only one IP address, I am using an independent DNS service instead of hosting my own nameservers. During the move, I am going to disable logging in, so that no one can add new content to the site while the move is underway. During this time, I will copy over an up-to-date copy of the website and the database.

Success! The Chess Variant Pages have moved to a new server, and this one is back in the United States.

I'm not sure what's going on, but play.chessvariants.com is still loading its content from the British server. I expect it is just a matter of time before everything is fully coming from the American server.

Play.chessvariants.com is now on the American server, and I successfully moved in a game with Game Courier. It failed to make a backup, but I hope I have fixed this by adding a chmod command before backing up the log.

Congratilations,Fergus!

There might be some more downtime. A problem that has come up on this new server is that PHP runs as the user apache instead of as the user chessvariants. This has kept it from overwriting old backup copies of Game Courier logs. I temporarily got it to make backups of logs by changing the file extension of backups from .bak to .bck, but the new files belong to apache instead of to chessvariants.

Looking into solutions to this, I may want to replace apache with something called NGINX. If I do this, all the virtual hosts I created with apache will go away, and I will have to recreate virtual hosts with NGINX. During that time, the site would not be available.

I installed OpenLiteSpeed instead of NGINX, but it looks like I'll have to learn to configure it, since PHP still runs with the user apache.

I have been looking into what should be the simplest fix of all, using SuexecUserGroup to change the user and group of the PHP process from apache to the user and group of the script, but it is not working yet. In the meantime, I have set the server's user and group to chessvariants with the User and Group commands. But this affects my other sites on the same server, and Wordpress needs to use its own user and group to update plug-ins. So I'm going to look further into how to get suexec working.

OpenLiteSpeed is a web server, which is the same kind of thing as apache. It is supposed to be faster, which may be a reason to switch over to it, but for now I'm looking to see if I can solve my original problem within apache. I'm considering creating a separate subdomain for images that would be handled by OpenLiteSpeed, because it is supposed to be a lot faster for static content. The subdomain would probably be called img.chessvariants.com.

Thinking about this, there might be an easier way to attack the problem.  If the problem is that the log files can't be overwritten because of the process trying to do it, rather than trying to run the process as a different user, you can probably just change the permissions on the files.  Something like:

chmod -R o+w *

run from the root directory of the files you want to change.  This won't change new files, but I think changing the permissions on the folder changes the permissions on new files that are created within.

It turns out that using User and Group to change the server's user and group to something other than apache disables sessions. Fortunately, it was apache throughout the night.

chmod -R 0775 */*.bak worked, because I previously put apache in the chessvariants group. But there is still the annoyance that new backup logs would belong to apache, and my blog needs the correct user and group to update Wordpress. So I'm still going to look into suexec further.

Can I get ftp access?

I have just sent userids and passwords to you, Ben, and Joe.

FTP is now available, though I do recommend using SCP or SFTP if one of those is available. Other than using port 21, the same details for logging onto SCP or SFTP will work with FTP.