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I have a quick bit of maintenance to do to the server that should reduce our hosting costs by a fair bit. Essentially moving down a few server grades to something more economical that won't affect the performance of the site. To do this, I will need to take the site offline for about 5 to 10 minutes (possibly even quicker). By the magic of modern hosting it should be a simple poke around switcheroo deal. It was quick and painless when I tested it on a test site, but of course things don't always go that easily! So may take a bit longer if things don't go to plan. I'll probably also slap a few non-urgent Operating System updates on while I'm there as well. I expect to start at 5:30pm on the dot - providing my day job work doesn't over run. Its not an urgent change but should hopefully save the forum accounts around £40 a month in hosting costs by doing this. I've left this thread unlocked in case someone is about to do an exciting collection late afternoon/early evening and I can postpone the update.

We need to upgrade the server this forum runs on. This current site is running Debian 10. In a few months time the Debian Project will no longer be supporting this version. It came out in 2019 and we are now 5 years on from then. That was the latest version when this server was originally built and now the latest is Debian 12 which it's life ends in 2028. Support includes all security updates and so it's important for us to keep this up to date for security reasons. Last night I spun up a complete new server. It's currently accessible here: https://autoshitetest.co.uk Please do login and have a play around. Right now search is still indexing (like here) and Email isn't working. I ran out of time last night for email but I hope to get that up soon. I have only restored this month's images as restoring all 215gb is expensive. The database restore is from last night at the time I started doing this restore. This site served two main objectives. First is to make sure the backups actually are useful when restored. Secondly, just as crucial, serve as a basis of the new server going forward. For those interested, it's actually running on our hosting providers latest ARM 64bit servers. Apart from a useful half price voucher this month, the performance of these systems promise to be a lot quicker than what this is on now. Also use less power for the same given task (so better for the environment). Likewise the datacentre they're situated in France claims to use significantly less water for cooling than most other DCs. I plan to keep it up for a few days at least but I won't be running it constantly as that costs money. I don't want us to double our monthly hosting bill with two identical sites! So have a play and see what you think. Let me know of any issues that you see. Performance should be good as it's quicker and less people accessing it. Remember any data saved or posted on there will be lost when I do the eventual switch over! Thanks.