Cranes at sunset

The fluffy one got to go to the hippodrome tonight, he likes it there and was able to have a nice run. I took a few pictures, the light was pretty but a bit of a challenge for my phone, but the result isn't too bad.

I'm rather busy and a bit frayed at the seams at the moment. Work is stressful, and at home I'm changing my hosting provider who was taken over and went downhill very rapidly. I will in future have two virtual servers, one in the UK and one in France. The French one will allow me to connect my computers at home to each other when they are at friends and families houses without having to route all the way to the UK for their VPN access. The UK one will be for a website that's used mostly in the UK, and a VPN access point that's in the UK - so I can access UK services as if I'm in the UK.

For my new UK server I've gone with another boutique professional outfit that is for geeks and have actual humans on the other end of an email. For the French server I've gone with a larger provider (who are cheaper) but support will be a pain. In both cases their web sites are very good (different in style but not substance). In practice once I've got Linux installed and I'm in, I don't need their control panels much.

The French server came up over the weekend, and the British one came up today - they did a manual security check to make sure I was a real person and not someone setting up something dubious - hence the slight delay. I've now logged in them both and locked them down, the defaults on both virtual systems was okay, but not safe enough to be left like that for more than a few hours.

Once they have their VPNs configured, firewalls in place and security checks all active I can move the websites over from my old server, update the domain registration and then finally move the email.

Once it's all done I'll save myself a few quid, have a better solution and redundancy I didn't have before - though I'll have two systems to maintain instead of one!