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Monday, July 13, 2009

I'm back!

12:58 PM / Web / No Comments

Well, yesterday was a laugh and a half for me as I spent it wrangling with a web site whose performance when it came to PHP and CGI scripts had become nothing short of outrageous. As I've mentioned a few times now, the site had for some time been a little on the sluggish side when it came to executing these functions, but on Saturday night I got back from work to find that it was taking upwards of two minutes just to post a comment, run a search or, in my case, edit or post an entry. Not good enough! I contacted my host, Domains Priced Right, and was initially informed that the customer support representative was "unable to duplicate the error". I persisted, offering specific URLs to test, and was then told that:

...as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance.

I was then presented with what amounted to little more than an advertisement to sign up for a dedicated server, the monthly fees for which were completely beyond my means. Rather than persist with my complaints only for them to fall on deaf ears, I decided to up sticks and arrange alternative hosting. Unfortunately, back in January of this year I renewed my Domains Priced Right subscription for twelve months, only six and a half of which have passed. Faced with enduring abominable performance for the rest of the year, I decided to simply write that expenditure off as a loss and jump ship immediately.

I searched around for a bit, reading testimonials from various web site owners, and eventually ended up at LD Hosting, a Germany-based company whose prices and services seemed to me to offer a more than acceptable trade-off between cost effectiveness and features. I went with their Silver Plan, which, for €4.95 per month, provides 10 GB of disk space and 100 GB of bandwidth - more than enough for my needs. It also supports cron jobs, subdomains, unlimited MySQL databases and all that jazz, giving me everything I need to run the site exactly as before. (As it happens, permission to execute cron jobs was unintentionally denied to me at first. I contacted their support department by opening a ticket, and within ten minutes I had a response and the problem had been rectified. That's what I call first class service!)

Transferring my data over to the new server was incredibly straightforward - surprisingly so, as I'd been dreading finding that I'd lost all the Movable Type custom fields I spent so long setting up and all the custom field data I spent even longer entering. Luckly, Movable Type 4.x's backup function is all-inclusive, creating a complete archive of everything, from entries to comments to custom data to spam filtering preferences, in a couple of mouse clicks.

Everything's up and running again now, and I'm sure you'll agree that the whole thing is much faster now than it was before. (Try running a search, or better yet posting a comment.) There may be a couple of kinks here and there to be ironed out, but I doubt it. If you come across any funny business, though, be sure to let me know.

Happy sailing!

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