Even if I was not posting something in the recent years I kept the blog alive as it my articles about the build traffic light, etc have been mentioned / linked on some other sides or podcasts.
This blog is hosted on an uberspace. It was on U6 the last years and I didn't touch it - Straight to the rule "Never touch a running system :-)
All U6 spaces will be shut down by end of 2020 in favor of the new U7 ones. So some work had to be done to keep the blog alive. The admins of uberspace wrote a migration script to support us users as much as possible. But nevertheless for my blog it still required some work as I didn't touch it for so long.
What was necessary to migrate this blog from U6 to U7?
- Kick off the migration script that copies all data, databases, eMail-Accounts and so to the new U7
- Clean up things not needed any more (databases, files, scripts)
- Export Blogposts, update Blog to Ghost version 1.xx, import posts, export them again, update to Ghost version 3.xx, import again. Some background: As I was not updating Ghost the last years I was still on version 0.11 that did not allow direct updates to version 3.xx - so the step to intermediate version 1.xx was necessary. There is a guide for Ghost on U7 I can recommend you: https://lab.uberspace.de/guide_ghost.html
- disable old cron-jobs that did the lets-encrypt https-certificate renewal, which comes out of the box with U7
- Update all DNS-entries to use my custom domain with U7 (new A, AAAA, MX-records)
- reconfigure all eMail settings in my eMail-clients
That was basically it. It took me roughly 1 day. After doing it once with this site as a dry-run I can continue to migrate my other uberspaces now :-)