Hosting Change Chatter

Written 11/10/2026

Hello everyone: if you're seeing this, I have successfully migrated my site to a new host and didn't completely destroy everything. I got back from Japan about 2 weeks ago now (and still haven't unpacked) and have not yet completed my full write-up of what I did for the 3ish weeks I was there. Instead, I made the very brave and bold decision to change hosts and am now here to dump some thoughts about my move, just because.

My history with webdev online has been fraught with moving between platforms. For a couple years, I hosted on Neocities with a free plan. This was the best for me since I only really knew about the "writing code" aspect of maintaining a website up until recently. After getting sick of the way NC operates, I decided to migrate to save myself a headache or two when opening up the site to do literally anything.

I decided on Teacake as my host when I left NC and ended up somewhat getting dropped in the deep end when it came to setting all that up and getting used to the interface. Even a year into that stint, I was very smart and accidentally deleted the site equivalent to a load-bearing wall which took it offline for a month. And now... I have done more deep-end diving and gone straight to NearlyFreeSpeech.

NFS is a bit different to Teacake in the sense that it doesn't utilise CPanel, which I had gotten very familiar and comfortable with over the last year or so... I've had to figure out new systems like WinSCP in order to put everything on here, which was very intimidating at first. Luckily it was a total piece of cake and I was worried about nothing! I'm even glad I was able to migrate without having to take my site down at all. If anything, I'm beginning to wonder if CPanel is just harder to use than WinSCP... it sure does feel that way.

Perhaps it was a bit of a silly decision because of my lack of knowledge of the hosting side of things. After all, I was finally comfortable with what I was operating on and was able to make updates without something blowing up (most of the time). But comfort doesn't breed development when it comes to skills. An artist isn't born with the ability to draw a human with perfect proportions and a writer isn't born with the ability to conjure up a perfect story - practice, learning, and most importantly trial and error is what gets them to where they are. I think continuing to practice and try new things in relation to my website will help me pick up more tips and tricks.

Aside from wanting to learn more skills, I also just wanted to move off Teacake because of some of the Terms of Service. At some point, I want to post more of my fiction writing and talk about BL manga on my site, but the TOS dictates that there's a ban on pornographic media for sites hosted on Teacake. Because both of these topics veer into NSFW territory and the TOS was pretty vague on what "pornographic media" specifically entails, I didn't want to risk my neck hurting kinda by discussing or uploading something that may fall into that criteria and have my site wiped into oblivion because I yaoiposted too close to the sun. But since I'm with a host that doesn't prohibit that kind of thing from the TOS anymore, I'm free to post... well, freely. LOL.

One thing I should note is that my email address has changed due to my hosting circumstances. All links to it have been updated accordingly. To anyone who has reached out to me via email at all recently, I won't be able to respond to anything you've sent to marin@snowvalley.online! Please contact me at suzuran_info@protonmail.com for the foreseeable future.

Before I head out for a little while longer, here's some page concepts I've had floating around in my brain since I've gotten home:

  • Page/subsection of site dedicated to Shrine and Temple visitation/Goshuin
  • Pages for my XIV OCs
  • Page (subdomain? or even just a new domain?) for my translation projects
  • Section for my writing
  • BL recs page
  • the Japan trip page, of course...

As a bonus: here's a poorly drawn mouse doodle I did of Ngha'li and K'lyhhia the other night because I missed them. I've gotta actually make content of them bro...

Have a good week!