Server migrations have a way of starting as maintenance and turning into a small saga. The last one I did before this was in January 2022, when I moved from a small overseas VPS to a Tencent Cloud Lighthouse instance. That was also my first time going through ICP filing, and I spent a long time discussing the process with a friend. With student pricing, I bought a three-year Lighthouse plan and figured that would be that. It lasted until last week.
For those years, the blog ran on a server plus object storage. That setup meant I could patch and rearrange things without backing up four or five years of image files every time. Traffic was small, and I had mostly stopped showing up in QQ blog groups or dropping links around. Some people in those circles had a habit of DDoSing other people's sites, so staying quiet felt safer.
Last week I was at work, opened my computer, and saw arrears notices from both email and Tencent Cloud. My first thought was the usual object storage charge—one or two yuan—so I ignored it and kept scrolling on my phone. Less than half an hour later another notice arrived. I opened the mini program and saw 87 yuan. That was not normal. I started digging and realized I had forgotten to stop the CDN DNS record, so traffic kept flowing. It was a busy day, I got distracted, and by the time I dealt with it the amount had climbed past 200 yuan.
I asked Tencent Cloud support about it. The reply was a template, and the short version was that the traffic bill was mine to pay. Hotlink protection had not been enabled. I was careless, but I was also furious. I complained to my friend for a while, then in a fit of pique bought a Cloudcone VPS in Los Angeles. I canceled the site's ICP filing that same day and migrated the blog while half-working.
That solved the immediate problem but not the speed problem. A few days later the latency felt much worse than before. I asked around in forums and group chats, followed my professional gut and an unusually strong third sense, and picked up a RackNerd server. The IP was in Seattle. For mainland China, that machine was a disaster. The latency was absurd, and SSH was unreliable—sometimes it would not connect, and when it did, the session could drop in the middle of an operation. I could not put up with that, so I submitted a ticket for a refund.
Then came the bigger disaster: the machine was not eligible for a refund. The plan I had bought through someone else's link happened to be one of the non-refundable ones. I sent three or four tickets and each one was firmly refused. After a long conversation with support, we reached a compromise: I could migrate to another region. So I went through another round of setup and moved to Chicago. Latency dropped from 400+ ms to 220+ ms, and SSH finally worked. I told myself: I bought it, so I will make do.
A few days later I noticed that posts with images were painfully slow. A post with several images could take forever to load. My brain started scheming about money again. People in a forum I follow and in blog groups kept mentioning DogYun. At first I assumed it was some blogger's fly-by-night cloud project. Then I learned that the forum itself used the provider, and after reading a few reviews online I started thinking about moving. Around the same time I saw that DogYun was running a fifth-anniversary promotion. After two days of thinking it over, I bought a Hong Kong server.
The assigned IP was easy to remember, and latency sat around 40 to 50 ms. The knot in my stomach finally loosened. Once again I migrated while half-working, and this time I was very satisfied. I figured I would stay at DogYun for a long time, assuming nothing went wrong. I just hope it does not disappear. The provider that vanished in 2015 left a thorn in my mind, and it has never really gone away.
After all that, one thing still bothers me: images. I have converted all the blog's images to WebP, and future uploads will be WebP too. But as the number of images grows, keeping them locally does not feel like a good long-term plan. I would like to hear how other people handle image storage. What is your setup?
Update, August 2024: I have since moved to Poju Gongfang. Hopefully it will not run away either.