We moved: how Alama changed servers in one Saturday evening

On Saturday 3 October 2026, at 18:37 Paris time, we froze everything that Alama writes to disk, copied the last changes to a new machine, pointed our addresses at it and switched it on. A little after 19:00 the shop, the game panel, YAWBDB and our mail were answering again, from their new home.

This article tells how that went, in detail, because a move is the moment when a small host can lose data, accounts or trust, and we would rather show our work than ask you to take it on faith.

Why we moved

Alama started on a small cloud server in Stockholm, shared by the website, the old billing software, the game panel, the YAWBDB Discord bot and its dashboard, the mail server and a few tools. By September everything fit, but only just. Memory was the limit: the mail server's filters alone took a large share of it, and every new feature had to be weighed against them.

We wanted three things at once:

• Room to grow: the new machine, at Hetzner in Falkenstein (Germany), is a much bigger machine, on fast NVMe storage.
• A shop of our own: the old billing software was replaced by a shop we built for Alama, in 13 languages, with sign-in through Discord. It needed to live next to the panel it talks to.
• Backups that do not live on the same machine: before, a lost server would have taken its backups with it.

The game servers themselves did not move. They run on our own machine in Nancy, and only the link between the panel and that machine was repointed.

A move rehearsed many times

The new machine was bought on 25 September, eight days before the move. It was not used for anything public until the evening of the 3rd. In between, it served as a rehearsal stage:

• Every service was installed from scripts, never by hand, so that the setup can be rebuilt from scratch, and was rebuilt several times.
• Each database was copied over, restored, and checked against the original: number of accounts, services, invoices, tables.
• The whole sequence, from "freeze" to "everything answers", was played as a dry run, with the old server still in charge.
• A way back was written before the way forward: a single command restarts the old server's services if the new one misbehaves. We did not need it, but we did not start without it.

We also set one rule for ourselves: we only move once everything is finished. The new website, the new shop, the panel, the analytics and the git server were all running on the new machine, tested, before we touched a single address.

The evening itself

Times are Paris time, on Saturday 3 October.

• 18:37 - writes stop on the old server. The bot, the YAWBDB dashboard, the panel, the billing software and the mail server are switched off there, so nothing can change while we copy.
• 18:38 to 18:41 - the last changes since the rehearsal are copied: the three databases, the files that go with them, and the mailboxes.
• 18:41 to 19:00 - our domain's addresses are pointed at the new machine. Beforehand we had shortened how long the rest of the Internet remembers them, to five minutes, so the change spreads quickly.
• 19:02 - a script that had been checking every address in a loop says all is correct: the website, the shop, the panel, the mail server's address and the records that prove our mail is really ours.
• 19:02 to 19:08 - the services start on the new machine and the old accounts are brought into the new shop.
• 19:39 - the shop's link to the game panel is finished: services and panel accounts are attached to their owners.
• 20:30 - the connection from the panel to our game machine in Nancy is switched to the new server.
• 20:45 - the last pieces are on: Discord sign-in for the shop, support tickets by e-mail, the analytics.

So, for about thirty minutes on a Saturday evening, the shop, the panel, YAWBDB's dashboard and bot, and our mail were unavailable. The website stayed up the whole time. We did not measure the outage from the outside to the second, so "about thirty minutes" is the honest figure.

What did not go perfectly

• The first time the shop tried to attach its customers to their panel accounts, it ran before it had the key it needed, and attached nobody. Nothing was lost; it ran again at 19:39 with the key, and worked.
• Two address records needed correcting during the checks, including the reverse address of the mail server. The check loop caught both before we called the move done.
• A few accounts from the old billing software never had a panel account, so there is nothing to attach them to automatically. We are going through them by hand.

None of these lost data. They are written here because they are the kind of thing a checklist exists for.

Backups, now somewhere else

Since 29 September, every night, the databases, the uploaded files, the mailboxes and the configuration are backed up off the machine, to separate storage. The backups are encrypted, deduplicated, and append-only: the server can add to them but cannot delete them, so a stolen server password cannot erase our history. The first full run copied all twelve sources, and we checked the repository after it.

If you want the same idea for your own server, we wrote it up in Backups that actually restore.

What changes for you

If you are an Alama customer:

• The addresses are the same: alama.host, shop.alama.host and panel.alama.host.
• The shop is new. Sign in with the same e-mail address. If your old password is not accepted, use "Forgot password" once. You can also sign in with Discord.
• Your servers, services, invoices and tickets came with you. Your old invoices are in your account, as PDFs.
• The panel opens from your server's page in the shop, in one click.

If you use YAWBDB: nothing changes. Same bot, same dashboard at yawbdb.alama.host, same settings. It just runs on a bigger machine.

If something looks wrong since the move, open a ticket in the shop, or reply to any e-mail we send you: the reply lands in your ticket.

What is left

The old server is stopped but not deleted. We keep it for a few more days as a last resort, then delete it for good. We are ending the old billing software's licence, and its data will be archived, as the law requires for invoices.

If anything in this story raises a question, write to us at contact@alama.host.