Moved Host
August 4th, 2009
I’ve finally followed through on my near constant threats to move from Register 365 and have now taken up residence on Digiweb’s server farm; Possibly spurred on by the offer of half price hosting for life. But why? Well, my reasons were two-fold.
1. I need SSH access to complete some of my everyday tasks. I don’t use FTP and rarely use the web control panel for managing the daily/weekly upkeep of my sites (backups and so on) so I needed a host that would come in at an affordable price, be Irish and have the features I needed. I was lusting after a Blacknight VPS for a few months but the admin overhead and the price kinda put me off. It’s overkill for what I’m doing.
2. The performance of the mySQL servers on Register365 took a serious dive in the last 12 months or so. Every so often I’d find my blogs slowed to a crawl. I went as far as to measure the time it took to load a page and that made up my mind to move. A bit over 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Or, about 3 minutes and 26 seconds longer than what I’d consider acceptable. After asking for a resolution, I was moved to a new SQL server where everything was hunky dory for a few months. Then, the same thing started to happen again. Seems the Reg365 mySQL servers are just majorly bogged down.
I was considering moving my site out of Ireland and back to the likes of Dreamhost but given my stats telling me that the majority of my visitors originate from Ireland, UK or Europe, I was understandably slow to move back to an oversold US based host.
Digiweb came in at a fantastic price, with three times the amount of disk space I used to have and a bandwidth limit I’ll never reach. They are missing AW Stats I was running last time, so I’m back to basics on that front.
Instead of being an advert for all things Digiweb, this post is a plea to my visitors. Given how complicated and possibly awkward I’ve made my site since it’s birth, I may have missed something in the move. I don’t think I have, but in case you notice anything odd or not as it should be send me a quick email. Or ring me. Or get me on twitter. Thanks!
August 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am
how difficult was the move? and did you move your domain name as well? the 365 database servers are almost hilariously shite, the only reason I’m still with them is moving looks like a pain in the arse. and I’m shocking lazy.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:15 am
The move couldn’t have been easier. In total I moved about 6 domain names and about 4 sites/blogs. Most of my domains are with godaddy so just changed the DNS in their control panel. Got shell access enabled on my digiweb account and scp’d everything across from register365. I was also shockingly lazy about the whole move but with the constant pokes that the poorly performing SQL server was giving me to move and the great deal I got from Digiweb sealed the deal.
I think in all, moving took me a day. That’s doing it the lazy way. If I’d stuck at it and done it all in one go I could have had it done in a couple of hours. I just tarred up all my sites, dumped the sql data to files and fired the whole lot across to digiweb. Of course the DNS on the domains took a few hours to update but that’s pretty standard. Same price, triple the space and no sign of losing shell access. Plus that new register365 control panel looked like a series of headaches waiting to happen. Maybe it’s a bit backward, but I do love cpanel
Good luck with the move, you certainly won’t regret getting onto some decently performing sql servers 