RSS Feeds: Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat
The old saying of "home is where you hang your hat" is true and to the point when using web hosting. This morning (my morning in the Philippines), I completed the move of all four of my blogs and another website.
The lights are on but nobody's home.
That's what it feels like to me. The DNS for two out of five domains hasn't propagated to his part of the world yet and I'm chomping at the bit. I had to edit the hosts file on my PC in order to write this now. Some things still don't work quite right. I can't preview this post, for example.
I don't know how long I'll have to wait because propagation can take up 72 hours from the time the nameservers are changed. It's okay, though, because the fifth site needs to have SSL in place and I'm waiting on a new IP address to use for it.
Despite my overuse of clichés, the move was transparent for most people. I made a small mistake and forgot to copy my Mint database to the new server until a few hours had passed, so I can't tell exactly how long it took for everyone outside of Asia. Luckily, only about a 10th of my visitors come from here — and they still have access on the old server, so it should be transparent for them when it finally switches — I just have to watch the comments.
The New Host
The sites are now being hosted at Media Temple [affiliate link] on a DV virtual dedicated server. I know they have a referral program, but I can't claim any referrals yet because my primary domain is part of my top secret project.
The setup is a bit more complicated because they use Plesk instead of cPanel, but that's okay. I have way more control over everything, including restarting the Apache server when something is behaving badly.
The sites should all operate smoothly. I enabled mod_deflate and installed APC, both which supplement the cache. I'm sure there are other things I can do to speed things up later on down the road, but I'm happy with it as is for now.
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I really need to do this too, but keep putting it off hoping my current host will upgrade its features – clearly they wont.
may i someday get to the point where i understand a post such as this. :) belated happy birthday as well. :)
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I know what you mean. Though i read today already about the locality of server being importnat to SE results on google, which was useful.. but i really know what you mean …. some stuff is so so technical!!! See my post of dedicated servers if you want, here it is:
The pros and cons of a dedicated server
I am certainly going to look into them as a webhost.
Yes, that can definitely be a huge pain in the neck!
I have experienced this when I upgraded my server, too. It's really time-consuming moving websites to a new server and I still need to adjust. But after the successful move, everything went on smoothly.
Hi RT— hey I know I have to make the move to a virtual dedicated server at some point, and while I was reading your post and thinking that you clearly know what you're talking about, I thought "Where's the ebook?"
Seriously, even if it's only 4-5 pages, I'd pay say $9.95 to have all my instructions in one pdf. Just a suggestion.
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I wish I had the time to write it. I have too much on my plate right now to put the necessary effort into an e-book.
Just last week I moved a couple blog sites to different ISPs.
I was really surprised when the DNS propogation delays were about an hour! I live in Michigan and I think some of the servers are located abroad so I was really surprised things worked that quickly.
I remember doing this about ten years ago and it did take about three days.
Congrats on the successful move. Control and uptime are two very awesome things!
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