Backdrop
Just a quick ("quick"? Are you sure you know what that word means? -Editor Ben) administrative update on the site. For about the past year-and-a-half I've been running an EOL version of Drupal here because moving to the next major version is a royal pain. So painful, in fact, that I've decided to stop using Drupal entirely and moved to Backdrop. Backdrop is essentially a fork of Drupal 7 (the release I was previously using). While Drupal 8+ seems heavily targeted at large commercial users, Backdrop is intended to be a simpler system for smaller users (like me! Which might be the first time anyone has ever used the descriptor "smaller" for me ;-). It even incorporates a lot of the improvements from later versions of Drupal without the massive architectural changes Drupal decided to pursue.
It's also a much more straightforward migration from Drupal 7. While I ran into a couple of snags with the migration, mostly because I run two sites off a single installation and that is apparently not a common thing to do with Backdrop, it went pretty smoothly. After reading through the migration docs and doing as much prep work as I thought was reasonable, I YOLO'd a migration on a new server (more on that in a bit) and...it Just Worked(tm). The new site had all of my content and it largely looked right, at least from the spot checks I did. I had to restore a few configurations, but nothing dramatic. I had not intended that to be the final form of the site, but if you're reading this, it's via that very first migration attempt.
It also performed better out of the box than my old site, by a wide margin. When I first installed my original Drupal site (way back on version 6), I had to enable the APC PHP module in order to get any kind of acceptable performance. On the new server I did no tuning of the PHP config (beyond what is required for Backdrop to run at all) and it runs as fast as I could want.
Hosting
It is also possible that my new hosting provider is helping with performance. I was not unhappy with my previous provider (Warpline), but my VM was so old that it was still OpenVZ-based, which causes a few issues in 2026. First, OpenVZ is no longer a popular hosting method because of the way it mingles the host with the VM. This means there isn't a lot of current information available about working with it. Second, because of the way it mixes a host kernel with guest package versions, upgrading an OpenVZ VM is problematic at best. I was actually unable to find a way to do it without re-deploying completely, which I was loathe to do because Warpline had no stock of new VMs and I had little interest in blowing away my existing installation before creating a new one. Since my OS was also out of support (and too old to run Backdrop), I needed to take action.
So I revisited the LowEndTalk forums for the first time in quite a few years. This is a site where a lot of hosting providers post offers for their services and users can discuss their experiences with those providers. It's where I've found all of my previous providers, and also where I found my new one: ServerPoint. From what I can tell, they're an established company with a solid reputation. And they're cheap. Almost too cheap. I'm a little concerned that this is a "too good to be true" situation, but so far that has not proven to be the case. My (now KVM-based) VPS has been stable and sufficiently performant for my limited use thus far. And best of all, it has 300 GB of storage, so I was finally able to restart remote backups of my 75 GB of photos. I had outgrown my previous 60 GB server, and I will sleep a lot better knowing my personal files exist outside my house.
Conclusion
Although any kind of major migration is a pain, migrating both software and hardware at the same time is even worse. Luckily, this one has gone pretty smoothly, and I feel a lot better knowing I'm not exposing an old, complex web app to the dregs of the internet (I had to write a fail2ban rule to stop people from chewing up all of my bandwidth with excessively large requests, in case you think I'm being harsh). I know of at least one minor styling issue with the new site, but if you run into any other problems please let me know.
Disclaimer: I have no involvement with any of the projects or companies mentioned here. I'm just a regular old user of them because they suit my needs.
