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.
