I have a few things to mention today. First, I broke my server on Tuesday. I came home from work, and got a notice that my blog was down. It happens rather often lately (more in a minute). In an effort to reduce the frequency of the outages, I decided to change how my server is setup. In trying to change it, I broke it. This is a sadly common thing for me to do. Break it worse before I fix it.

Some back story might be necessary here. In my day job, I work in IT. I work with a lot of Microsoft technologies, which are pretty good for the most part. One of the areas that I work with is Azure. A while back, I hosted my websites on a virtual machine (VM) that ran on equipment at work. It didn’t (and doesn’t) have much traffic, so I didn’t put a lot of load on our systems. Still, it wasn’t “mine”.
So, in an effort to get a bit of separation, and because using Azure is something I need(ed) more practice with, I moved my websites, including my blog to an Azure VM. I am not making money on any of the sites that I own, so this is a definite cost. So I chose to use Azure Spot Instance for my VM. This is a way to get a lower cost, but there is risk that they will shut your VM down at random times.

I don’t remember the exact progression, but the spot instance is something that I started using in 2020. I think I had another VM before that. Hard to remember now.

This worked great since that time, but in the last 2 months, Azure has started shutting down my spot instance much more frequently. As in, multiple times a day on some days. That is rather annoying. I decided I needed to move to a VM that was a bit more stable so that I don’t have to keep turning it back on. I probably could have written and automation to turn it back on for me when it goes down, but it just felt like it was time to move to a real VM.

And that is how I broke my server. I went to go change it to NOT be a spot instance, but quickly realized that isn’t an option. Which is kind of a bummer.

In an effort to fix this, I decided to delete the VM, and move the system drive to another VM. It is doable, but not the way I went about it. So I just built a new one, and copied everything off of the other disk. And then had to re-install a bunch of stuff, and re-discover how to deploy WordPress on Windows. Some of the tools that I used to use for that are no longer supported, but then some things have better tools and methods. And I learn things each time I go through something like this, so there is that.

I probably should work out a better backup plan than I currently have. Which is to say, I don’t have much of a backup plan. And already this blog is getting more attention than I have given the other one, that I have had since 2004 ish.

So, what have you broken lately?

—

Fun fact..  Normally, I write my posts and schedule them for their publication date and time.  For today’s post, I am posting it once I finish writing it.  One reason is, I am now past my 5 PM post time for today, and I didn’t have a previously scheduled post.  I am really trying to get back on track with this and be more consistent with my posts.