My backup VPS!

One thing I’ve learned about post4vps’s is that they don’t last for that long.  The VPSs are generally sponsored, and sponsors do lose interest and do take the VPSs back.  Needless to say I had to learn how to make the content of my VPSs transportable, and also be resilient in setting up a VPS fast.  That includes loading VestaCP, setting VestaCP up and installing the domains and websites in short time.  Initially I installed WordPress from the command line, but eventually added Softaculous to my VestaCP and now I don’t even have to create databases.  I get lightning fast from installing the WordPress site from Softaculous to importing a backup with a miracle plugin called the All-in-one WP Migration tool.

Amid all the uncertainty I decided to purchase a cheap HostUS.us VPS to serve as a backup VPS.  However I soon learned that paid VPSs also aren’t that perfect.  In January 2018 there was a major HostUS.us disk melt-down – a one in a million event but it happened for real.  My VPS completely went up in smoke.  I at least got the opportunity to change the location of my VPS from the US to London, however it meant setting everything up from scratch again.  I really loved my new location and the IP was great, until end of April I forgot to renew my VPS in time (was only 2 days late), and the VPS was instantly zapped and permanently erased from the server.  I was able to replace it, but had to get a new IP, and that IP didn’t behave the same as the previous one.  Looks as though I inherited an old IP with lots of history spam bots.  The offsetting positive was plenty of learning experiences.  I learned how to change the port number of my VPS, set up the VPS for keyless entry and how to disable the login.  Was very proud to make all of it work up to a month ago, until bad luck happened today when PuTTy was unable to work with the key. I couldn’t get into the VPS.  Had to do another OS reinstall and this time limited the security to a random port number.  Keyless entry and disabling the login can have negative consequences.

Good part of all of this is the great learning curve.  In order to avoid forgetting to pay my 3-month subscription when it was due, I decided to go for a year subscription instead and am paying less for the VPS.  Today when the keyless entry bombed out, I took the opportunity of changing the VestaCP 5.6 to 7.0 after I loaded VestaCP – another learning curve successfully accomplished.

Another plus of having the backup VPS is that I can experiment to heart’s content with it because I have an excellent control panel from HostUS – Breeze Panel.  All I need to do when I’m in a pickle is to reinstall the OS.  My “free” VPS, VPS 9 in contrast doesn’t have a Control Panel, so I use my paid VPS to experiment before I try new things with my free VPS.  Tonight I attempted a php change from 5.6 to 7.0 on my backup VPS.  Plan is to do this for my “free” VPS but am hesitating a little as I have many more domains at risk on VPS 9.

Both VPS 9 and my HostUS VPS have Softaculous Premium loaded, so absolutely brilliant how fast I’m able to install a WP site.  All of it worked seamlessly today.  The All-in-one WP Migration tool did warn that problems could occur with importing a backup that was created with php 5 to php 7.  But the three WP sites I imported seemed to have been OK regardless.  Needless to say once imported I immediately made php 7 version backups of them.