Home » Kupatrix

Category Archives: Kupatrix

Updates in 2026?!

Posted on by

I spent some time today finally deciding and migrating my old webserver. Kupatrix and the other domains, alongside kupax.com, are all running on a new backend and more secure setup. I’d been putting it off because I thought it would be a lot of trouble, but it turns out to not be that bad.

The current design for the site is a little broken (what is wrong with the menu?!), but I will update it over the next bit, it shouldn’t take too much trouble thanks to how good Catchbox still is. Not a fan of this new way to post to wordpress though, I really miss the old method, maybe there’s a plugin for it…

It’s interesting a lot of the old manual tweaky things I did to the previous VPS/droplet aren’t needed this time around, the backend solution I chose is already built with security in mind, and Digital Ocean has gotten much easier in spinning up and configuring things. Cloudflare especially is really useful now, I can just setup rules to just straight up block any access to stuff no one should be touching.

I plan to use my personal site more (famous last words) but this was the first big step in getting it figured out. Hopefully all the old images are back up and will work properly.

Listening to VG Music from the Past

Posted on by

I’ve been going through my files, some date back to ancient times, when dialup was standard, and blinking html was cool. In the past I used to have a Drupal-powered website, this was before I learned about WordPress, and I admit that I enjoyed it, I don’t think I really had that much trouble with it, but as far as a running a single person site, it seemed overkill. Eventually I moved on to WordPress, but in doing so I wiped my old site clean, along with it some various sections and files. Why does any of that matter?

Well I used to have a cool little mini-guide on playing SPC or PSF/2 files in Winamp. Earlier I came across my old “music” folder on a backup and it had some Final Fantasy game rars, along with Winamp 2.95, and SNESamp (a plugin for winamp that enables playback of snes SPC music files). Currently I’m listening to Chrono Trigger music — the really cool thing about this, is that it’s not just converted, it’s literally the same sounds you hear when playing the actual game.

Recently I’ve been adding a lot of random pics to my stash section, however I think I’ll detour from the mindless graphics to vg music, it would be sort of fun to recreate my old guides.

Moving from Shared to VPS: Goodbye Dreamhost, Hello Digital Ocean

Posted on by

I happened across a promo deal with this startup canadian company, offering seemingly crazy “one-time cost” VPS hosting. And I thought, what the heck I’ll go for it. So $35 later I’ve got my own VPS. Which is a scary thought since I’m prone to break things… except on a VPS that’s not a problem! After I broke and re-imaged the server a few times I was starting to get the hang of things. I’ve never been a complete novice when it comes to command line stuff (after all I am a web geek), but I’ve not at all a “sysadmin”. Boy did I have a lot to learn!

At any rate I thought having a VPS was fun, plus it was amazing how fast things were. I honestly didn’t know that WordPress’s Admin area could actually so responsive and quick. I was hooked. I decided “I want this for my main sites”, and so I proceed to make that happen.

However, I wasn’t going to pin everything to this startup, so far they’ve been great, and the VPS I bought from them is still up and running perfectly, but I definitely wasn’t going to throw up my 7~ year old sites on a brand new company like that.

I’ve always known about Linode, it has sort of been “When you’re ready for serious hosting, go to Linode” in my mind. I had actually been set to sign up with them, even if they were a bit more expensive but eventually I decided to go in a different direction. There’s a newer VPS provider that’s been making waves lately called Digital Ocean. Their prices certainly can’t be beat, but one of the other draws they have is that they offer SSD hosting. And damn are they fast, I can’t gush enough about how freaking fast they are! It was definitely worth the “hassle” of having to set things up myself.

So far I’ve been with them for a few days, and through the use of rsync, mysql dumps and imports, and a nifty search and replace windows program (to fix mysql database path stuff), all my big sites are back up and running on my super fast VPS. I’ll likely make a few posts regarding the technical aspects of moving hosts, since aside from some of the Digital Ocean tutorials/articles, most Linux “How Tos” are extremely confusing and/or out of date and/or just obtuse.

I would like to give a shout out to Dreamhost, my previous hosting. Shared hosting is a great place to start off, and their custom panel is definitely a painful loss. Having to do things manual now is quite a pain, and don’t even get me started on setting up email!  I actually found Dreamhost to be extremely useful in helping me prepare my move. The fact that they offer you shell access for shared accounts was a godsend, I couldn’t imagine having to manually download my file hosting sites and then slowly uploading them to my VPS over days, or even a week or longer.

EDIT: For anyone interested in Dreamhost, feel free to use my KUPATRIX promo code, it’s one I setup ages ago, offers a free domain for as long as you’re with Dreamhost, and has a discount, though I forget for how much

The one thing I was surprised about was that there were no specific articles about moving from Dreamhost to Digital Ocean, I would have figured DO would have had one themselves, or at least someone somewhere had written about it. At the least I figured I would post a few articles on my experiences.