Category Archives: Hosting

My Process: Moving to a New Webhost – Part 3

In my last post, I mentioned that I was moving the DNS over to my new host, and if you are reading this, then you are seeing the newly hosted site on WiredTree rather than Host Gator.

I want to say again, that Host Gator has been, and continues to be really great to me, but I wanted to move all my hosting under one account for me to manage better.

Mistake in Moving the WordPress Blog

One of the biggest mistakes I made in moving this site to its new hosting was getting overly excited about setting it up via Subversion. Instead of moving the site over from Host Gator to WiredTree and then setting it up to be able to be upgraded through SVN, I downloaded the latest stable release of WordPress through SVN and then had to deal with the situation I had made.

I imported the posts, moved over my themes and plugins folder, but of course all of the settings that were in the database, were not exported from the old site, and I had to set up all of my plugins once again.

Not that big of a problem, but a bit annoying. It did allow me to audit my plugins, and only activate those that I really needed.

FTP Issues

Another issue I had, which seems to be something on my end, rather than my hosting is my inability to transfer everything I had for the site in one fell swoop. I had to uploaded only a few folders at a time or it would time out. It was very frustrating.

File Ownership and Permissions

One other side effect of using Subversion the way that I did was that I was root when I installed the blog via the tool, and that meant that all files were owned and grouped under root. This meant that when I logged in using the normal user name and password I had, I wasn’t able to overwrite files or folders at all. A quick chown and chgrp fixed this, but I have definitely learned my lesson.

DNS Issues

One of the cooler things of having a VPS with WiredTree is that I have my own domain name server address. This also created a small issue for me as I wasn’t used to setting it up. I wanted ns1.xfep.com, but Xfep.com wasn’t pointed to my new IP address yet. Thankfully, I was able to figure it out with a quick bit of support from WiredTree, and adjusted my Godaddy information as needed.

This means that when dealing with the rest of my domains, they will all point to the name servers that I have created, which, to me, is very cool.

The Next Steps

Now that this blog is set up correctly, and there doesn’t seem to be any huge issues I have to iron out, I can work on streamlining the process and move all of the other sites I currently have over to my VPS.

Hopefully, I can get all of this done by the end of this month, and start canceling all of my other hosting.

Originally posted on May 21, 2008 @ 1:25 pm

My Process: Moving to a New Webhost – Part 2

So, I have finally changed the DNS over, and I plan on writing a much longer post soon about the steps I have taken between the first article and the DNS switch, but I wanted to put up a post saying that if you see this post, you are looking at the new hosting. Hopefully, it will be faster, stronger, better.

If you notice anything strange, please let me know as I made some mistakes in how I moved the site, but I think I worked them all out.

Originally posted on May 17, 2008 @ 11:49 pm

My Process: Moving to a New Webhost – Part 1

I am already getting ready to move all of my sites over to my new web host, WiredTree. I am still learning what it means to own and manage a virtual private server account, but I have already been able to install Subversion to manage my WordPress installs and upgrades, and so this will save me valuable time on upgrading as each new release of WordPress comes out.

WiredTree had Yum set up, so installing Subversion was very easy. While logged in via SSH, I entered yum install subversion and it did the rest. Afterwards, I was able to download the latest version of WordPress 2.5.1 though the now installed Subversion system by entering svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/ . with the final period at the end referencing the local folder being very important to the command.

Next time, when I update to the next stable release, I will use the svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.2/ command in my shell prompt rather than the svn up command that people using the trunk releases use. I won’t be using trunk as I need my blogs to work correctly at all times, despite most people not having issues with trunk, I don’t want to take any chances.

To learn more about installing and maintaining WordPress through Subversion, I suggest you check out the codex page entitled Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion.

Next, I moved all of the files for this site over to the new hosting space, and checked to make sure everything looked correct.

My next steps are to get the database for this blog set up on the new site, export the content from this blog, and import it into the fresh, new blog on my WiredTree account. I will then move the DNS so that it points to my new hosting, and see if everything is working correctly with this blog.

I plan on moving the DNS during the weekend, when I have a lower amount of traffic than normal, so that if I do have problems, they won’t be as noticeable to most people compared to doing this whole thing during the week. If everything works as planned, all of the other sites I run will slowly be migrated over during the next two or so weeks.

Originally posted on May 15, 2008 @ 5:16 pm

Changing Web Hosts

So after finally deciding that I am going to bring all my sites under one roof (see Hosting: Dragging Down Profits so Consolidating), I went on a hunt to find the best web hosting I could under the needs I had listed, and after asking a bunch of people, doing some research on a variety of sites, and searching on Google, I have found the web host I am going to go with at this time: WiredTree.

I will be using their $49 per month Managed VPS account, which will provide me with the following:

  • Intel Dual Xeon Clovertown (8 CPUS)
  • 256MB Guaranteed RAM
  • 1024MB Burstable RAM
  • 300GB Bandwidth
  • 30GB RAID-10 Disk Space
  • Fully Managed!
  • ServerShield Server Hardening
  • 24/7/365 Phone and Help Desk Support
  • Proactive Updates and Monitoring
  • 4 IPs
  • cPanel / WHM
  • Fantastico
  • Virtuozzo Power Panel
  • Nightly Backups

I am pretty impressed with it so far, but I haven’t done the hard part: moving the sites. I have played around with things on the server, and started uploading files. This blog will be the test site, and if moving this site goes smoothly, I will begin moving all of the rest of my sites over. This also means if you notice something weird over the next week, it is most likely from the server move, but please, let me know as I might have missed something or messed something up and not yet noticed it.

Originally posted on May 13, 2008 @ 10:36 pm

Hosting: Dragging Down Profits so Consolidating

One of the most difficult things that bloggers have to deal with is hosting and for me, that issue is coming up more and more as I build up bigger sites, and I now want to bring everything under one hosting account with one hosting company.

Currently, over half of my projects are hosted on Host Gator, and while I have nothing but happy words for the service that they have provided me (see my recent post on Host Gator’s support), I am starting to hit a wall due to the popularity of this and other sites that I run on their hosting. Basically, I have had too many open connections more than once, and they haven’t been able to tell me the exact cause, thus leading me to think I need bigger, better hosting.

The rest of my projects are hosted on Mosso, except for my personal blog. Mosso is great, except I am not a fan of their control panel. I find it fairly limiting, and I hate learning curves when dealing with hosting. I try to stick to hosts that allow me either a cPanel control panel, or root-like access through SSH. Anything else, and I get frustrated. Who wants to spend a day learning how to manage hosting, especially when you have enough work in just needing to run a dozen sites?

My personal blog is being hosted on VortexHost. This is a smaller hosting company, but the service, and support has been bar-none the best I have ever had. Pricing might not be the most competitive, but it was one of the first web hosts I had ever used, and I have never been disappointed by the decision. Justin, the owner, has always been very helpful and adds his personal touch to making sure I am happy, whenever he can. Most other hosts I have used have been compared against my experiences at VortexHost.

I just feel like it is time to pick one company to manage all my hosting needs. This would hopefully help cut down costs, as I am paying what I consider a pretty penny for all my hosting.

On average, I would say that around $60 each and every month is spent to host my various blogs. This one has the highest traffic with nearly twenty-thousand page views a day.

I was thinking about looking at other “cloud space” hosts that work in a similar vein to Mosso, or maybe going with a company like Slice Host, as they keep coming up on my radar.

Some hosts I will not consider, due to personal experiences:

  • Dreamhost
  • A Small Orange
  • eMaxHosting

If you have any thoughts or recommendations for me, please let me know. Who should I be hosting with? I would like to keep it under $40 per month, and I would like to have cPanel and/or high level SSH privileges. I would like to have a high level of stability, and great support. I am fairly tech savvy, but I am not going to sit around messing with ipchains on the server.

Originally posted on April 20, 2008 @ 7:44 pm