No, no – I haven’t physically moved (unless you count puttering around my house – and you shouldn’t). Rather, I’ve moved electronically. Virtually? More specifically, while this is still the same Nowhere Pub you’ve been visiting before, just like the titular one, the door from the outside is in a different location.
Lucky you, though! You’re a Regular, so you can always find the door, right?
What ARE You Babbling About?
For those who may be unaware, websites don’t just magically happen “in the cloud“. As someone once remarked, “‘Cloud’ just means using someone else’s computers.” And that’s the way most websites are run these days. The notable exception being (typically) companies which are large enough to have their own full-power web infrastructure (along with all of the hardware and staff to support it).
Instead, many websites go through “hosting providers”. These are companies which manage the hardware and network infrastructure for customers’ sites, letting their customers manage the “content” (a word which has come to mean far too many things, not all of which have positives contexts) of their sites.
Case in point for me: Every word you see on this site (aside from comments from others or boilerplate info from some of the addons) was written by me. The images were, likewise, also all selected by me. The computers which store that data – and respond to your browser requests to view it – those are owned and managed by someone else … the hosting provider I use.
So – “Moving” Means What…?
The simple answer is: I’ve changed hosting providers. I had initially signed up for a three-year contract with one provider and that contract is ending very soon (less than a month as I write this in May, ’24). The renewal rates that same provider would charge me going forward were significantly greater than the rate they had charged for my initial purchase. (Worse, though, it was also significantly greater than the “teaser” rates they still offer, but that’s a whoooooole separate rant.)
Being the smart shopper I am, I shopped around. And found another provider with at least comparable provided services for a dramatically better rate. Thus, it was time to change providers and, in doing so, “move”.
What Does This Mean For Me?
As a visitor to the site, this was completely seamless. The biggest part of it was just waiting for the “change of address” to distribute across the network.
I won’t get into all the deep, dark, dull details of how one computer finds another, but – short form … Once one device gets the “address” for another device, that answer comes with a “time-to-live” (TTL). The TTL, measured in seconds, is basically the way to say “How long can you use this before you have to check again”. There’s nothing which says your device can’t check every time, but that can turn into a lot of network overload. So TTLs allow that info to be cached for some pre-defined period of time. The longer the TTL, the more stable the address needs to be. After all, someone looking for you won’t try for a new address until the TTL expires.
Using the above explanation, the new site was all set up and raring to go (having migrated over already). After that, it was just changing the address in the “phone books of the Internet” [Yes, I’m showing my age by referencing “phone books”], and waiting for the newest possible TTL fetch to expire. After that, it was guaranteed anyone wanting to come here would be looking in the right place.
And, yep – you found me again (still).
Welcome back and I will be doing a Spring 2024 anime post real soon now! I promise!
