Hosting remote Allsky site with Ionos

[Daggy-O]

Created an account with Ionos yesterday, made an /allsky directory under hosting and sftp user with permission to the allsky directory. Adjusted the webspace destination to point to /allsky directory. Is hosting on Ionos really this simple, is that a major benefit of going the hosted route, or did I just get lucky. It feels like it should be a bit more complicated than essentially what I did above. About to start working on troubleshooting sftp portion for video, keograms, and startrails if so since none uploaded to local or remote site this morning.

[EricClaeys]

I've been using IONOS / 1and1 for about 30 years, and yes, it's that simple.
Depending on your plan, you may be able to get an SSL certificate which allows you to use the more secure https instead of http.

See the Documentation link in the WebUI for help in getting uploads working. Problems are 99% due to incorrect settings.

[Daggy-O]

Looked over the ftp settings late last night and I had the local and remote lines swapped with each other. This morning local website upload worked so I now added the remote site to the ftp settings for tomorrow morning.

[EricClaeys]

Great, glad it's working. FYI, the next Allsky release GREATLY simplifies the FTP settings and basically eliminates the mistake you, and many many others made.

You can run generateForDay.sh --help to see how to test the keogram, startrails, and timelapse uploads now, without waiting for tomorrow.

[Daggy-O]

So my ftp settings are slightly off from a one for one copy of the documentation. That being said I was able to successfully force a manual upload to the remote site with the below sftp settings. My sftp user for allsky on Ionos goes only to the /allsky folder. I am thinking that is the reason I do not need the /allsky in front of the remote directories?

# The directory where the timelapse video should be uploaded to.

VIDEOS_DIR="/videos"
VIDEOS_DESTINATION_NAME=""
WEB_VIDEOS_DIR="/home/pi/allsky/html/allsky/videos"

# The directory where the keogram image should be copied to.

KEOGRAM_DIR="/keograms"
KEOGRAM_DESTINATION_NAME=""
WEB_KEOGRAM_DIR="/home/pi/allsky/html/allsky/keograms"

# The directory where the startrails image should be copied to.

STARTRAILS_DIR="/startrails"
STARTRAILS_DESTINATION_NAME=""
WEB_STARTRAILS_DIR="/home/pi/allsky/html/allsky/startrails"

As soon as I add anything to either of the Image directory entries however, they will stop updating their respected local/remote sites. So this is just the location for the current image on websites homepage that's always continuously updated? I just answered my own question I think.

    # The directory where the current image should be copied to.

IMAGE_DIR=""
WEB_IMAGE_DIR=""

[EricClaeys]

My sftp user for allsky on Ionos goes only to the /allsky folder. I am thinking that is the reason I do not need the /allsky in front of the remote directories?

Correct. If the user that Allsky uses to log into IONOS starts off in the "/allsky" directory, then Allsky doesn't care what's "above" it in the directory tree. On my server I have several directories in the "/" directory, including allsky, allsky-test, and others. All the allsky-related directories (1 for each Pi) have their own login whose root directory is the directory, so all my FTP settings use "" for the Image Directory.

As soon as I add anything to either of the Image directory entries however, they will stop updating their respected local/remote sites.

which "image directory entries" are you referring to? IMAGE_DIR and WEB_IMAGE_DIR.
Because your FTP login puts Allsky in the correct directory, WEB_IMAGE_DIR needs to be "". I found that with IONOS it doesn't work to have WEB_IMAGE_DIR="/", even though in theory it should.
Those two settings determine where "image.jpg" goes. If IMAGE_DIR is empty, Allsky uses ~/allsky/tmp/image.jpg, which eliminates copying the file to ~/allsky/html/allsky.

[Daggy-O]

So just for ease of troubleshooting in the future I then should update the image_dir for the local web server on the allsky pi to ~/allsky/html/alsky folder and call this thread done.

Just one unrelated question to any of the above. Is there any documentation on adding url links to the allsky homepage that I have missed? Also don’t know keywords to attempt a useful google search. Would want it to look like the diy build your own link on the bottom right of the page.

[ericofpendom]

Hi Daggy-O, can I ask which plan you used on IONOS?

[Daggy-O]

Plan wise in my late night stupor I ended up with the ultimate plan for Ionos and not the plus plan that I thought was in the cart. Since they have a within 30 day no questions asked cancellation policy I will most likely cancel it and go with plus. I honestly just want the unlimited quota for the data though. That being said with the file sizes for the videos/keograms/startrails with default allsky settings even the essential or starter plans would work storage wise I think for at least one or two weeks if not more depending on allsky settings. Eric however may have a more knowledgeable opinion on that though. The only thing I haven’t looked at yet are the single file size limit that ionos allows to be uploaded if there is one.

[EricClaeys]

My 2 cents as a happy 30-year 1and1 customer.
I am pretty sure my plan is grandfathered in so is no longer available. It's a Windows plan with unlimited data and includes email and ftp limits I will never reach. It includes 1 SSL certificate and I am paying for another. I have been very happy and the cost is reasonable so I have no desire to switch.

If you are only going to store a few weeks of timelapse, keograms, and startrails you don't need a lot of data. A couple hundred GB of disk space maybe? The Allsky code only takes a couple MB.
A future version of Allsky will have a DAYS_TO_KEEP setting for remote Websites to make it easier to not use too much disk space.

I have never hit a single-file limit with IONOS, and would be surprised if they had one.