DragonBlogger.com Cut Over to New Hosting Provider

28 January, 2010 - 07:00 AM - 10 Comments

It was with great hesitation and procrastination but I finally decided to cut DragonBlogger.com over to a new hosting provider last night. The whole process took me about 7 hours start to finish, starting at 6pm AZ time and finishing by about 1AM the following morning. I just had too many outages and too much conflicting information and poor support from my previous hosting provider that I had no choice but to switch.

My wife had been using HostMonster for about 4 months and she has not had a single outage on her sites (all 3 blogs) since cutting over, I cut over my two smaller blogs on MLK day and they haven’t had a single outage in a week and a half. Meanwhile DragonBlogger.com took a 6 hour outage yesterday due to something causing a huge memory leak on my old hosting provider, and this was the last straw for me.

Now all of my blogs are using HostMonster which is a shared hosting provider, I did have a Virtual Private Server (which gives you dedicated RAM and CPU), but I was not happy with the support and issues I was experiencing which necessitated my switch. There were some initial bumps but most of these were due to learning the new hosting provider and how to configure and tune my blog properly.

First off the bat, the WP-HTML-Compression plug-in for wordpress broke my blog on HostMonster, I was getting the following error with this plug-in enabled:
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

Disabling that had my blog working, but I was having performance and pageload issues. It turns out FastCGI was the problem and limited to only 5 simultaneous connections, I switched my blog to using PHP5 without FASTCGI and my blog started performing better right away. One other thing my hosting provider told me was to disable WP-SuperCache as it makes wordpress perform worse in most cases with their hosted accounts. I disabled WP-SuperCache and my blog became noticeably faster, so it seemed to help.

On the weekend I will go through and trim as many non-essential plug-ins as possible to try and improve pageload times again, as well as convert as many png and jpg files to gif’s on my homepage to speed up their load times as well. In the meantime, this site has been completely transitioned to a new database, web server, hosting provider with all files, plugins, themes, uploads (500MB worth of image and file uploads across my almost 900 posts). If you find anything amiss or not working, do me a favor and leave me a comment would ya?

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by Justin Germino (1518 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow Justin Germino on Twitter @dragonblogger

Frederick F

In end of April, my blog hosting server caught fire and I was forced to migrate my blog to another host.
It took me alot of time to set up the blog in the new host as I was not very good in migrating wordpress. As a result, I have lost some of the post.
I wonder it there any short tutorial to learn how to migrate a wordpress blog?
.-= Frederick F´s last blog ..I am a Newbie, I don’t Know How to Blog =-.

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Dennis Edell

Good luck my man. I too am with Hostgator as someone mentioned above. Never a large issue and small ones are taken care of quick as a flash.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Hello & Welcome To The All New – DennisEdell.com/DirectSalesWebMarketing.com Merged – Direct Sales Coaching Blog! =-.

Extreme John

I know how it feels bro, I can tell you a hosting story nightmare that I went through that was on the news, it would blow your mind. Good thing you made the move when you did.
.-= Extreme John´s last blog ..11 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me =-.

dragonblogger

Problem is now my tabs.php are broken on new hosting provider, and I don't know how to fix it.

novz

i don't imagine transferring yet with all the hassles involved.i used to have a problem with my hosting (a philippine provider). my site was down 3 weeks, and tech support wasn't available 24/7. but i stayed with them till they purchased new servers, and upgraded their hosting. no 24/7 still, but no more downtimes, even with a rushing traffic that downed some of my friends' sites hosted on i-power.
.-= novz´s last blog ..What Will Make You Quit Blogging? =-.

Allyn

BTW-- wasn't the VPS rather expensive?
.-= Allyn´s last blog ..Targeting The Long Tails In Internet Marketing =-.

VPS cost me about $350 - 400 per year, it fluxuated month per month based on how much RAM I was using and peaking with. So I paid $150 for the annual, then between 12 and 30 per month depending on usage.

I don't know who your old provider was, and i have never used hostmonster, but for me, I use only hosts who work specifically with internet marketers.
I have multiple reseller accounts, but most I keep with Midphase and Hostgator.
I have never had one outage with either one. This is because they set up the accounts with WP internet marketers in mind.
AL
.-= Allyn´s last blog ..Targeting The Long Tails In Internet Marketing =-.

Dreamhost was my old provider, HostMonster is my new provider.

Ralph

I don't think I am ready to do that kind of maintenance. I am hoping that the success that would make something like this necessary will also produce the income to hire somebody to do it.
.-= Ralph´s last blog ..The Top 10 Reasons to Post Daily =-.