Some while ago, my ISP told me that my host seemed to be being used to for junk traffic. Their answer: re-image my host. After a while, they went quiet, without me having done anything at all.

I took the point though. My host was a Debian based system that I installed some five years ago, and have not updated nearly frequently enough. My main reason for not upgrading was because my mail went through the box, with virtual hosting exim4 system that I installed way back, that I would stand little chance of reproducing quickly.

I solved the email problem by switching my MX host to my incoming mail fastmail.fm. It cost me an extra $19/year, but heck, well worth the extra to move up to their Enhanced option with the ability to host your own domains.

Finally, it was time to re-image. Having already backed up everything to the backup space provided by my ISP, bytemark.co.uk, I managed to re-image my host to Ubuntu 9.10, unpack the necessary (mysql, site, apache config) and have my site up and running again around 25 minutes after clicking the 're-image' button. That's kinda neat (expecially considering the time I thought it would take when an exim4 install was looking necessary).