The site was briefly inaccessible today, and the RSS may show up as having some duplicate entries. Why? The Ministry of Type has moved! Servers that is. I would like to convey the sense of a thrumming nexus of raw computing power; a darkly gleaming enclosure of steel and carbon fibre buried deep underground in an impregnable vault under some faded ancient pile just off Whitehall, but I fear the truth is a little more prosaic.

Instead of a tiny patch of disc space on an overcrowded server among thousands of others in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs, the Ministry’s online presence now occupies a spacious new server dedicated to a few carefully selected occupants. It’s most likely still in a vast, grey, air-conditioned warehouse in one of London’s more dismal suburbs though, but I gather that that’s by far the best habitat for servers.

So yes. Welcome to the new server!

Files can be uploaded, it’s now all working just fine. Finally!

That was probably the biggest pain in the arse of any site I’ve ever had to get going. EE Core installed instantly, I’d got the templates all sorted out already locally (using MAMP, which is awesome) and then the database kept falling over for some reason.

I host with Supanames who are normally pretty damn good (I’ve recommended them to friends in fact) but they’ve beefed up their timewaster controls on support requests. Cue much tediousness of explaining that, yes, I have tried to access the site using a different browser, that I can get to the control panel and a completely new error from phpMyAdmin is hardly likely to be a browser caching issue… but hey. It’s now sorted. Turns out that the database was corrupted.

Sigh.

So. On with the type!