Penguin Tutor moved to new hosting provider (from Compila to Streamline.net)

My PenguinTutor.com website has now moved to a new hosting provider. It didn’t go quite according to plan, with a few hours down time (perhaps more depending upon DNS caching), but it’s now moved over.

The reason for me moving provider is detailed in blog entry: PenguinTutor.com – DOS due to attempt to break in to website – Read the fineprint when signing up for a hosting deal.

Compila (my previous hosting provider), could not be blamed for the DOS attack, but they were far from helpful and turned it around that I was breaking their terms and conditions due to 5 files which happened to exceed their 1MB maximum file size. As a result of this I’ve now transferred to another site that does not have that rule: Streamline.net. It’s taken a week to transfer, but fortunately that was just after my previous hosting contract was cancelled.

This new hosting provider is a little more expensive. In fact they are even more expensive than it appears as they don’t include DNS for non-UK domains – charging £15 extra to transfer the DNS entry to them. Fortunately I have friends that maintain a DNS server, only charging the cost of the entries with the registry, so I didn’t have that extra expense. I was a little annoyed that these costs were not stated up front.

The next problem was that they flagged my site as a possible fraudulent account, due to using a non-UK IP address when I signed up. I’m not even sure who they were trying to protect. They certainly weren’t trying to protect my domain as I’d not even requested the transfer at the time. With that hurdle over I then had to get my domain transferred from my old provider. They required validation of my identity (which I was glad of as they were actually protecting me in that case), and then it took another day or so to get transferred. Finally I then had to update the DNS servers, which eventually resulted in my website being active again.

During this period I’d tested my website and it appeared to be working (as long as I changed my DNS entry locally to point at the new DNS servers). When it finally transferred it had however stopped working (not sure if I was actually running using cached DNS or something as I’d not seen these problems before). One problem was that some of my webpages use the PHP $_GET variable, which did not work on the new site.

I then found that the cgi-bin directory did not appear to be set-up correctly. Not sure why but it turned out the fix was to choose “reset cgi-bin settings” on the hosting provider’s control panel.

Finally it’s a case of waiting for the DNS entries to get propogated around the DNS servers around the world. Hopefully it should all be working OK again.