Over the years, Shirt Pocket has been hosted on a number of local Unix-based systems. As I recall, it started out on a Cobalt Qube, then moved to a Power PC Mac mini, then the original "tall" Intel Mac mini, and finally to a "short" Intel mini.
These systems served us well, were easy to manage and, important for the time, meant we were fully "in control" of our site and mail.
There were downsides, though.
Apple has obviously moved away from the whole idea of "macOS Server", leaving a lot of the details of keeping things up to date and relevant to the "modern internet"...and eliminating the original "easy to use and manage" reasons for selecting it in the first place.
But even more than that, since the mini wasn't in a data center, extended power or network outages would take our site down completely—an obviously ridiculous situation. A few years ago, a huge snowstorm took cut power for two weeks, and while I was able to find alternate "hosting" for the site (thanks, Jon!), it wasn't ideal. Not to mention when it would happen when I was on vacation.
Fortunately, while macOS Server is no longer really relevant or useful, in its place are a million cloud-based providers, many from huge vendors like Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
A few years ago, I moved from our own Kerio mail server to one of those: Microsoft's Office 365 Exchange service. That went extremely well, and so, with the threat of winter storms looming, it was time to make the change.
As of Wednesday, all of Shirt Pocket is now "in the cloud", as it were. I'm using SSDNodes, a high quality provider with great support for many Unix variants, Docker, fast bandwidth, etc.
Bruce had used them, successfully, to bring up our Paddle-specific micro services, with no downtime during that transition. A good choice.
So, with that experience under his belt, Bruce guided me through the transition (doing much of the work while I looked over his shoulder, learning how to actually work with Docker, Traefic, etc) and the result?
So, we're now up entirely in the cloud. The Mac mini is off, after probably 10 years of always-on (well, mostly-on) service. One of its RAID drives had died and come back to life, and I had a SuperDuper! backed-up SSD ready to go, but now it won't be needed.
You'll get better service with hopefully no downtime, I don't have to worry about the power going off when I'm away, and thanks to Bruce, I now mostly understand how to use, configure and maintain a Docker-based set of services that, in aggregate, look just like the old web site.
While the dusty old graphics and layout still look like they were created in 2005 (yeah, I know - I have to allocate my limited time carefully), and you probably didn't notice anything had changed, the whole thing works...better!
Can't ask for more than that.
And now, after many years of faithful service, the mini gets a well deserved nap. Well done, little guy. Enjoy the rest.
