Nothing like an emergency host move to get the juices flowing...

On januari 19, our then-current webhost Bluehost suspended our website due to 'excessive MySQL use'. All our sites, as well as the mailing lists (so in short, all our means of communicating with our membership) were shut down; a hard to miss 'notice' that we had outgrown the services Bluehost was willing to extend us at our shared hosting.

I got Bluehost to unsuspend our account to investigate, but even after a couple of days investigating and optimising MySQL queries, our account got suspended again. We're running 5 fairly standard Drupal sites (the main sites, two photokinas, a conference and the contests site), and none of them seemed to have been misbehaving. The bluehost servers seemed to be taking suspiciously long on some recurring, but simple MySQL calls. Our 'child' has grown up, and is just too big for a cheap shared hosting package.

After much deliberation among the new BoD and the newly reinvigorated webteam, we have chosen Mosso to be our new hosting provider. Their grid/cloud-based setup ensures we will be able to scale our websites by quite a bit.

Unfortunately, a cloud-based server-park is just different from a typical (shared) web hosting package. Some seemingly simple features I have grown accustomed to at other hosting companies are absent, due to the radically different setup. The most dearly-missed feature is being able to have multiple databases that are available for a single MySQL user. At Mosso, each database has one user, and each user can access only that single database.

Previously, the IVRPA website consisted of the 5 different subsites I mentioned. Each subsite had has own database, but all subsites used the user-related tables (user, profile, sessions) from the main site. This is not possible at Mosso, and that has caused our subsites to have been missing so far.

After quite a bit of rethinking, I have just put the Photokina 06 and Conference 07 subsites back online. Both these sites are running Drupal 4.7, sharing the CMS code with the main site. The two remaining subsites (Photokina 08 and the contests site) were set up using Drupal 5. Getting the Drupal 5 based subsites back up is going to take a bit more testing, but should be relatively straightforward.

Looking forward, we're once again planning/looking forward to updating the main site to the Drupal 5 codebase. Like I've tried to explain before, the 4.7 -> 5 update is a 'biggie', and compounded by the change from flexinode to cck. Upgrading from Drupal 5 to 6 should eventually be a lot simpler. During the move to Mosso we have already made the first steps to making the 4.7 -> 5 move. Work in progress, as always.

PS: MySQL issues seem to be a recurring 'thing' for us...