Now We’ve Gone and Done It

A while back I wrote a post on making your web pages load faster. Imagine my embarrassment when I got an email a few days later telling me my own site was loading slow. And then another email. And another. Wait, what? How could my own site be loading slowly? So I started digging. I used Yahoo!’s Y-slow, removed a few images, checked my site over for extraneous crap…still slow. Then I opened Terminal and pinged my server…840ms response time. HOLY CRAP! My server is hosted 300 miles away! It shouldn’t be pinging at 800. In fact, no server should be pinging at 800! EVER!

That was it. That was the final straw. I’d been debating about it for a long time and had moved all my other websites but now it was time to finally bite the bullet and move Daily Thing. It could break. I could kill it all and lose 7 years of blog posts. I didn’t care. I’d rather lose everything than put up with that crappy host any longer.

So I opened up Transmit, downloaded my image files and plugins from WordPress, downloaded a daily backup of my MySQL database from the host* then went Cpanel and unlocked my domain and transferred it over to MediaTemple, the best host I’ve ever been with.  Now we ping at 24ms and everything is fast and snappy again.

I guess that’s the reason I set up every one of my clients with a website on MediaTemple and not somewhere else.

*Tip: If you want to move your website and you’ve been around for a while be sure to use your most current database backup and import it through PHPMyAdmin rather than using WordPress’ built in Export/Import functions. There are a couple problems you’ll run into that you can easily avoid.

1) Most hosts leave PHP’s default upload setting at 2mb, way too small for any website that’s been around for a while. You’ll get a php error trying to upload and import your file from WP.

2) WordPress’ built in Export function exports an XML file it builds over your HTTP connection. That connection often disconnects and you’ll end up with only a partial download of your posts.

3) Your hosts database backup contains all the content, file structure and SQL commands to reinstate your database exactly as it was in a gzip package. No need to worry about only getting part of your posts. If it was in wordpress, it’ll be in the database.