DreamHost server migration

So, going into this, I figured I would need to update some git settings at the very least, and thinking this could balloon into a big ordeal, I put off investigating the migration until the weekend, when I would have more free time to deal with any issues.

Saturday afternoon came, and after my wife and I finished our normal morning errands and routines, I sat down at my laptop, and opened the two emails I had received from DreamHost regarding the migration: the first was a heads-up that the move was happening, and second was sent after it all had taken place. This second email also included links to DreamHost’s Knowledge Base with a few key pieces of documentation to resolve any known issues that can surface as the result of a migration.

My first check was to log in to both my Kirby panel, and the DreamHost panel to see if everything was still running fine. To my delight, both loaded with no issue. Next came attempting to push a minor change from my local copy of the site up to my remote repository. (My setup now has any changes that are received to my remote repository on my hosting server automatically get copied to the appropriate directories.) This failed. I sighed. This was the thing I was dreading.

For some reason, I had it in my head that my remote origin for my repo was set using the server name of my shared server on DreamHost, which was named “craig”. After checking those settings, though, I realized that instead my git pushes were instead going to my domain, jasonneel.com. Nice! I didn’t need to make any changes to where my remote was pointing to.

So what was preventing me from pushing changes up to my site? SSH keys. No surprise, it turns out that authenticating with SSH keys wouldn’t work because the signature of key on my remote no longer matched, hence the error I was receiving.

Luckily, DreamHost‘s provided documentation covered this, as I’m fairly certain this is a common issue when doing these migrations. I followed “Method One” in their ”Updating host keys” knowledge base article, an lo and behold, I could push my changes up to my server like nothing had ever changed. Awesome!

It’s an amazing feeling when you go to do something you’re sure that’s going to break everything, and then once you get up the courage to just try it out, things are much simpler than you imagined and everything goes off without a hitch.

I‘ve been a happy-paying customer of DreamHost for nearly 17 years. I recognize I haven‘t done too much with my website over that timespan. My hosting account has largely been a place for me to tinker and play around with things.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from DreamHost saying they were going to do some maintenance on my account, including migrating me to a new Ubuntu server. That’s cool, I thought, but my brain immediately went to what kind of a nightmare this could be post-migration.

You see, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in my abilities to deal with server and environment setups and issues that can arise from them. It often feels like my website workflow is held together with duct tape and rubber bands. Anything that can upset what is currently working is an opportunity for something to break, me to not be able to quickly resolve the issue, and then having that imposter syndrome dread that I’m in a position where I don’t know how to resolve something that I should. I’ve, so far, had too many dead-ends in the process of trying to set up this current version of my website that I’m feeling a little skittish anytime I need to make drastic changes.