I’ve selected a new hosting company for this blog, one that I have reason to believe will provide better service. However, the new installation will require an extensive amount of my time for setup and migration. Sooo, less time to write for a while.
The graph (right) shows the number of visits to to the blog from January 20 – 31. You can see the effect of interest the Georgia eligibility hearing on January 26 and the effect of the site down time on the 29th. The 2,000 visit number for January 31 is more than double the average number of visits just a month ago. The average visit consists of (on average) 5.8 page views.
unless you’ve been censored
I recently left my hosting company, F2S, shortly after it merged with TalkTalk Business, after nearly 10 years. The reasons were largely because their website was hard to use and they kept making arbitrary changes to the FTP method I used to upload files. Also they’re based in England and I don’t have international long distance, so it cost me 30 bucks last time I called for a password reset. I switched to GoDaddy earlier this month. I’m liking it much more.
I feel bad though. That was the longest I ever committed to anything in my life.
I use 1&1 myself
I’ve been with DreamHost for 7 years before they just went down the tubes.
I signed up with Rackspace today, but those folks are virtually impossible to use unless you are a Linux ubergeek. You create a cloud server and you don’t even get web unless you install it manually. I couldn’t believe how messed up and confusing their tutorials were. You can pay a fortune to get them to manage it all for you and I guess that’s their business model.
I’m going to look at VPS.net next. Noting suggestion about GoDaddy and 1 & 1. Maybe I should look at Lunarpages. I’ve had an account with them for at least 10 years for email and one of my personal web sites plus the two church sites I maintain.
The essential challenge is that this site has too much traffic for simple shared hosting, but not enough to justify some of the bigger plans. Rackspace really would have fit price wise except I’d have to become a full-time Linux system administrator to make it work.
That concern is touching … projecting conspiracy on Doc’s behalf! No, BA, the idea that the site’s technical troubles are due to opposition forces is very unlikely. Birthers by and large aren’t terribly tech savvy. Meanwhile, hosting trouble, bandwidth problems, etc., etc., are common, daily occurrences.
Total Choice hosting worked well for me for years, and I like the easy-to-use cpanel.
http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/
I’m sorry that Dreamhost isn’t your dream.
It’s not exactly mine either, but it’s cheap and has usually worked for this site whenever I’ve visited.
Perhaps do ping and full page download tests before and after the change to see if you’ve moved up or down in access and/or loading times.
After the DNS propagation goes through, you won’t have a chance to get your “before” stats.
Perform the tests at the same time of day if you can, not forgetting about browser caches, etc.
I know results may vary due to all sorts of variables, but it might help gauge if it’s a gross change for the better or worse.
Being on Dreamhost myself, I’d be interested in knowing too.
Upon switching servers or browsers, one can sometimes get that “my car is faster because I just washed it” type feeling.
Just suggesting a proactive approach since you might not get a 2nd chance. 🙂
I don’t know that you’d need a cloud server -the cloud sites offering is also extremely scalable- and is intended more for the person who is not a linux sys admin and doesn’t need a specialized configuration of php. Set up on this platform is very, very fast.
The Cloud Server indeed does come bare bones – but there are some good tutorials out there:
http://blog.svnlabs.com/installing-apache-mysql-php-in-centos-5-5-on-rackspace-cloud/
I set about three or four of these up a month – it takes about 6 hours to get everything ready and going, but once it is done, backup is a breeze, and the service has been, for me at least, very reliable.
Just in case anyone has an interest in the issue, GoDaddy was one of the Intertubes companies that was for the Stop Online Piracy Act afore it was agin’ it. A lot of customers, apparently parted ways with them over that one.
Just sayin’ 🙂
I signed up for “Cloud Hosting” at VPS.NET. The claim is that they quickly scale RAM and CPU up when you have a surge in traffic. That would be ideal for things like the release of the long form birth certificate or the Georgia hearing in Atlanta where the number of visitors jumps up for a day or two. The long form spiked 8 times normal traffic!
That said, they limit bandwidth (which based on historical patterns is extremely generous for this site) and they limit the number of domains, email addresses, and databases — again nothing that should cause problems here.
That said, the first few days have been awful, with them creating firewall rules that block me from my own site. (I had that problem a few times before with another host. Fortunately, that experience helped me get customer support on track more quickly.)
The big issue when moving a blog like this is the database. I don’t have shell access and that makes it really tricky. I intend to use the HeidiSQL client to move the databases, but I had to fight a whole day to get Heidi working (because of the firewall issue).
Given the problems and my retirement aversion to hard work, the move is progressing slowly.
One of the problems with DreamHost is that a WordPress blog takes a lot more RAM than it does elsewhere. There a memory plug-in for WordPress that I use. I’ve genned up the same blog on DreamHost and somewhere else. Every visit takes like 8 MB more on DH. While I had shared hosting DH kept threatening to kick me off unless I went to a Virtual Server (because of the traffic) and once I went to the VPS, they started rebooting the site saying I was using too much RAM, and demand that I set my RAM up to very expensive levels. I’m in for about $40 a month now.
I had 13 hours of down time on one day and maybe half a dozen hours scattered over two weeks. And to add insult to injury, their chat support for VPS customers just disappeared.
It’s just been one damned thing after another for months now.
I was floundering around in that tutorial. It was really was outside of my skill set.
Well, it might not be a fair test. The DreamHost server is in LA and the VPS.NET cloud I’m on is in Atlanta (like 150 miles from me).
Also the cloud hosting Business Plan at VPS.NET is only $20 compared to like twice that I’m now paying at DH for shared hosting, VPS and database VPS.
FWIW, I find the site loads VERY quickly since the switch.
And while we’re mentioning hosting companies, LunarPages has done a great job for me over a dozen years, both for my personal web site and our company web site (before we got bought out). I still have my personal web site and accounts for the two church web sites I do. They have had some rough patches way back, but have been running well for a long time.
I went to DreamHost back when LunarPages had some constraints that they latter dropped. They have a much better implementation of SpamAssassin than DH does.
That said, I have never tried to do any volume with LP shared hosting and I don’t know where it breaks. I could just about run Blog or Die! or the church web sites anywhere. This one, however, gets tricky.
I haven’t switched yet. ;(
Maybe you shouldn’t, then…
Agreed… Or at least hold of doing so for awhile. Maybe the prior problems have been fixed at the hosting level…
There are many issues besides the recent outage and I also hope to reduce my costs ultimately by several hundred dollars a year (not just for this blog).
Hey, that will improve the bottom line of OCT, congrats! Can’t wait for the updated financial statement! 😉
Please note update to this article.