Down for the Weekend
Posted on October 19, 2006 in Blogging
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:27 am)
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:27 am)
I’m going to be moving davidseah.com to a new server starting Friday (October 20). I’m currently using Pair Networks, which has been great. I’m moving to FutureQuest, which has as gold-plated a reputation as Pair. The reason I’m moving is primarily because I’m starting to exceed the “maximum transactions per minute” limit allowed by Pair’s database servers during peak times. I’m also curious about FutureQuest, which I’ve heard good things about, and how the heck one moves a WordPress blog in the first place.
My checklist looks like this:
- Recreate mailboxes and forwarding aliases on the new server.
- Copy files over to new server via server-to-server FTP
- Update dependent services (Basecamp’s FTP settings).
- Lock comments on the old server blog
- Clone the WordPress database (which I’ve already tested last month)
- Switch over the DNS name servers from Pair to FutureQuest, and wait for the new DNS information to propagate over the weekend.
- Cross my fingers
My email will also be up and down as the nameservers sort themselves out on Saturday and Sunday.
RANDOMLY THINKING…
Hm, that MediaTemple Grid-Server package is looking kinda tasty too.
6 Comments
If I didn’t just switch from Dreamhost (HORRIBLE) to Steelpixel (so far, so good!) I’d be seriously eyeing the (mt) GS package. It looks soooooo nice.
When I moved my WordPress and Mint dbs over, using export to SQL scripts, none of the tables had the Auto-Increment attribute restored on the ID columns. Things were all wonky. I had all the new data that transpired, but “Most Recent” features in Mint and comment approvals in WP weren’t working right, just FYI.
DNS changes propagate much faster these days…There was virtually no lag with email or anything from what I saw.
Good luck!
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The MediaTemple (gs) Is VERY well done. I myself was solicited to help them develop their RoR ‘container’ system – I didn’t get to, but I was in the beta. Even though I have my own servers, their system was VERY juicy.
Hm, I may sign up for the GS package and try some round-robin server experimentation. One week of FutureQuest, followed by a week of MediaTemple :-)
Posting a comment. Does this work on the new server? YES!
Why would you ever drop Pair, they are one of the best in the indsutry…
Pair IS great, as I’ve said before…I’ve used them since 1998 or so. However, there are some limitations in their database serving: no more than 15 concurrent connections, no more than 1500 queries per hour. I have been noticing for a while now that PHP has been sluggish (even with caching) and I’ve been seeing occasional MySQL timeouts. If this strikes when a page is being requested for the first time, it creates a blank cached page and breaks the site until the cache expires, or someone writes in to tell me and I reset it. The server has been REALLY sluggish too for me just editing and saving posts. I’d done everything I could think of to optimize my wordpress installation, and I have decided to move.
I can’t really correlate these problems directly to the growing popularity of the blog, but they have been persistently intermittent enough that I have been planning a move for some time. I’m in that weird middle place where I’m starting to need more resources that a shared server account can provide, but can’t justify a dedicated server. Plus, I wanted to try some other services anyway to see how they were. For static page content, Pair is still great…it’s really my database requirements that started to push the issue; I’ve heard that around 3000 dynamic pageviews a day is where you start to push things with pair. I’m averaging about 2200 right now.