As it turns out, VPS hosting was not for me. Just to recap, here’s the hosting history of TechPatio.com for the past almost 7 months (since TechPatio was first launched):
- Surftown shared web hosting plan. I’ve been a customer there since 2004 – (a few months).
- Surftown VPS beta hosting as part of a small “VPS beta hosting test group” – (a few months).
- Surftown VPS hosting, 1 year free hosting as a “thank you for helping out with our VPS beta” – (a week).
- CS New Media shared web hosting.
It’s actually very simple. I didn’t like the Surftown shared hosting plan in the first place as it has SAFE MODE ON, which is quite annoying when it comes to WordPress and lots of plugins. The VPS beta plan was okay, though I spent many hours setting it up.
Then I moved to my very own VPS plan which I had for free, for a year. It came with 256MB of memory and apparently no SWAP space available. So when memory ran out, there’s trouble! I have no clue how to set it up properly, how to install scripts etc. to check for uptime and restart services whenever necessary. I also don’t have a clue about keeping Linux and all other packages updated with latest security relases and so on.
Even worse, for some reason, the frontpage of my Thesis WordPress theme was slow. I mean, really slow, 8-12 seconds to load the frontpage. I never found out why and the great guys over at the Thesis Support Forum couldn’t figure it out either.
I gave up and went for a new host which I’ve heard many great things about: CS New Media.
They have a great Plesk control panel that’s very easy to use, backups, mail, MySQL and everything else you’ll need. Safe mode OFF, of course. It was a very smooth move, moving TechPatio from VPS to CS New Media and it runs great, I must say.
Hopefully now I can get back to concentrate on what I like, instead of spending time troubleshooting Linux and VPS.
You’re getting really good at moving your site and keeping it totally up, as far as we readers can tell. Perhaps you can do this for those of us who don’t know how – charge $100/hour or something. Just an idea for another income stream!
.-= Christie´s last blog ..How introverted do I want my life to be? =-.
Hehe, yep, I’m getting better and better. But I don’t think I would wanna do it for anybody else, lots of complicated stuff can easily surface.
Good to hear you have moved to somewhere you think will improve your blog!
.-= Tom @ Money Conversion´s last blog ..Money Conversion Calculator =-.