Westserve

Of web sites and servers

Apologies in advance for the geeky topic…

For nearly four years I’ve had a web hosting account with a very large hosting company in America. It is a shared hosting account, which works just fine for a site like a personal blog and the like.
But I’ve outgrown the shared hosting model, with a handful of sites I host starting to suck significant server resources.
That, plus the fact the big hosting company is letting me down more and more with outages and downtime increasingly common.

I could bore you with lots of discussion about the ‘wisdom’ of big hosting companies overselling their resources… but I won’t. :-)

What I have done is started the process of moving my most important sites to different facilities. This is a complex and involved task that needs a lot of planning.

Step one. Research the millions of options available for web hosting. I settled on a managed VPS. Managed, because I don’t want the hassle of learning how to manage everything about a web server, and actually doing it.
After several days researching, I’ve settled on Liquid Web to try my hand with.

Step Two. Learn how to drive the very comprehensive control panels that allow detailed configuration of the server. This plan give me root access to the server – a very desirable, if potentially dangerous ability.

Step Three. Set up a basic site, such a blog, to test my knowledge of the process and to discover the differences between this system and what I currently use.

Step Four. Slowly, step by step, transfer domain by domain to the new server. There are no short cuts with this. Copying Mb’s of files from server to server. Installation of CMS software. Dumping of MySQL databases and then restoring them on the new server. Duplication of email accounts. And so it goes on.

Wish me well with Steps two to four!

Updates to come…