Server migration, from Digital Ocean to Hetzner

on 2022-08-05

Well that took a while.

After 6 hours I am finally done with this. It was hell but I feel accomplished. However I'm still tying up lose ends.

Why?

I wanted to move my stuff from Digital Ocean to Hetzner for few reasons:

  • Digital Ocean is american owned company, Hetzner is german
  • They have datacenters in Finland, where I live, thus I have lower ping
  • They are cheaper and have better specs for the prices (as of writing this)

I just feel safer when my data recides in same country I live in. Also supporting European companies just feels nice.

That and the cheaper price of course.

Gitea and my blog

This was the least painful thing to move.

First I moved my blog. It was pretty easy, just install apache2 and copy the files to /var/www/ and set up the config.

However I could not get Gitea dump command to work to make a proper backup. So I gave up.

Since I already had the most repos on my PC, I just copied the bare repos from gitea's folders to my PC, reinstalled Gitea completely and just.. Pushed the repos back there. Didn't take too long.

Matrix

This was also a hassle but.. Eh? I don't really even remember what I did.

I just basically reinstalled the whole thing like I mentioned in my older post: [Matrix stuff]({% post_url 2022-04-01-Playing-with-Matrix-Conduit-and-Synapse %})

But instead of creating all the files from scratch, I copied the homeserver.db over with scp from the other server.

I was dumb at first and tried to copy the file to my own PC then back to the new server but that would've taken ages.

Use scp for between server transfers. It's great. Or rsync.

Nextcloud

Argh. This took some time.

Again, installed it as usual. Tried to follow this here forum post.

It mostly worked, but I had copied my data to wrong place and I had to move it. Then I had to run nextcloud.occ maintenance:repair so that everything clicked in the right places.

So when using commands from internet like that, double check them.

DNS

Luckily I didn't have that much problems with DNS. Hetzner has a cool automatic way to get all the DNS stuff, except for my e-mail settings. That I just copy-pasted all the rest.

It just takes time for nameservers to switch around so I had to set both Nextcloud DNS and Hetzner DNS to point in same things.

Why did it take so long?

It took so long because everything is scattered in million places, there's barely any information for your specific problems, etc.

I had to basically take all information on the internet and slap them together in a giant mess, then parse that mess for all the relevant stuff.

I don't want to ever migrate my stuff ever again. If I have to change cloud providers, I'll just download all my shit to my PC and reinstall everything, then reupload back.

Urgh.

Now excuse me while I reinstall Jekyll and all the fun stuff for this blog to the server so I can upload this post.