So there was us happily thinking things were getting back to normal, enjoying a beer on the terrace that latterly had become our base of Friday operations. We sipped our ales and couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment. In spite of adverse circumstances, in particular the closure of the LXF Towers deli, we had kept making the magazine and soon things would be back to normal. And then, the phone rang. It was UKFast. To what did we owe this pleasure?

Well, says they, “we’ve been looking at our legacy contracts, and it seems you’ve been getting free hosting from us since, er, 2008”. Indeed, in the early days of LXF, before Future knew about things like the internet, UKFast generously gave us not one, but two dedicated servers. One of these was shut down last year while the other, right up until early May, hosted linuxformat.com. There’s no way we could reasonably expect UKFast to continue to provide free hosting, especially since management have got us all drinking the digital-first Kool Aid. Times change and servers are expensive, so we decided to move things in-house.

Naturally, we thought our world-class devops team could sort all this out in the blink of an eye. So we documented our setup, outlined