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 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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