Move to VPS Done (aka We’re Home for Thanksgiving)
Last night I began the move of the last site (figured it would pretty quite). Although, I originally wanted to attach it to the WordPress MU site (what this and the others are on), I could not find good documentation on getting getting all the users on 2SecondsFaster.com into the Wordpres MU database. So I just transferred the site and will look into moving the site into MU later.
In an ongoing documentation, I took a few screen shots of the log statistics from the shared hosting account. It is interesting how growth in the last year has driven the decision to move to a VPS. Though the sites are not massive or an extreme level of use, they had begun to hit the top of what a shared hosting environment is useable for. I was at just about 200,000 pages views this month, with a rolling 3 month average of 150,000. It started becoming obvious over the last 6 months that we needed more resources. With load times at the shared host running 3-4 seconds on average and now I we are about 1-1.5 seconds without bit of optimization.
Couple that with the 40 meg limit of the shared host and I had essentially hit the wall. I could not upgrade the WordPress blogs due to the ram limit. WordPress runs with about 23 meg with a bunch of plug-ins. On the VPS I can set virtually any limit (right now 64 meg) and it is running much smoother.
The graph below shows all my sites growth over the last 11 months. Now if I could only have my 401k and income match this growth chart!
As a last note, my ability to connect to 1and1.com servers was interrupted at least 4 times last night. The sites on the server were down 4-5 times and it took a long time to connect to via FTP. I spent about an hour, just trying to begin the download. It is funny, because in the last 5 years I have almost never seen one of my sites down with 1and1.com. It may have not been the “best” host or the one with most functions, but it was pretty reliable.
Related posts:
- The move to the new server is all done (mostly)
- VPS vs. Share Account Performance (Apples vs. Oranges)
- Scale
- Moving a WordPress Website
- Windows Home Server: 60 Days Later