Switching servers & migrating sites can be a HUGE deal (or not), depending on things like:

• Number of sites to transfer
• Size and complexity of sites
• Who is hosting your sites
• Experience

I recently did this, switching from a 3-year run at ASO to my new home at Media Temple. Total of 24 properties, with WordPress running on around 10 sites. Past experience with VPS servers really had me paranoid about running out of memory. A few years ago, Perishable Press alone gobbled up 256MB of RAM at WiredTree, so add another 23 sites on top of that and needless to say I was extremely concerned about the migration from a shared-hosting environment to a (dv) Base account limited to 512MB RAM.

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Just a note that PerishablePress.com will be migrating to its new home at Media Temple. Thanks for your patience as the DNS propagates. If you encounter anything seriously weird, like unexpected errors or anything, please comment on this post or send an email. As always, thank you for your help.

Okay – here goes nothin’!

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Getting the best possible web hosting is for obvious reasons something that all website owners aim to do. However, you might know what type of web hosting you are looking to get but still do not know what provider to partner up with. Many of the web hosting top lists you find on the web today look the same as they all take the same things into account. These guides usually take into account similar factors and cost usually is weighted highly. While many people do simply look for the cheapest host with decent reviews, there are others who seek slightly more from their provider. Below are some of the most sought after hosting types (dedicated, shared, vps, green) and some of the providers within those categories who may be overlooked by users but provide some excellent service.

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Just when I thought I had finally solved my web-hosting woes by transferring to a virtual private server, I am slapped in the face by the cold realities of server memory limitations. Apparently, WordPress-powered sites are extremely resource-intensive, requiring insane amounts of random access memory (RAM), something which does not concern those of us working from shared hosting accounts.

On a shared server, system resources are shared among the various accounts that reside on a particular server. When one of these sites takes a hit and requires extra bandwidth, it “borrows” it from the total amount of bandwidth available for the other shared sites, leaving them with limited memory and other server resources. This is one of the reasons that shared hosting can suck so badly at times. If you happen to be located on a server that hosts a few resource-intensive or unstable sites, chances are high that your site will not perform as well as it might if its neighbors weren’t such stinking pigs.

With shared servers, it is this sharing of server memory that enables WordPress-powered sites to enjoy their resource-hogging plugins without too many issues. Sure, sharing memory can sometimes be a drain when you are fighting with hundreds of other sites for that extra megabyte of precious memory, but at least your site doesn’t shut down if you happen to exceed the predefined memory limits. This is exactly what happened after I setup Perishable Press on my new virtual private server at WiredTree. To be honest, since this was my first move away from shared hosting, I really had no idea how much memory my site was using. Turns out that just this one site — with its reduced number of plugins and optimized content — was enough to gobble up every drop of the 256 MB of allocated RAM without even blinking. It was like, okay, site now online — oops, not any more — you just exceeded your memory limits and crashed Apache. Again. Ugh.

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..And we’re back. After an insane week spent shopping for a new host, dealing with some Bad Behavior, and transferring Perishable Press to its new home on a virtual private server (VPS), everything is slowly falling back into place. Along the way, there have been some interesting challenges and many lessons learned. Here are a few of the highlights..

The tide may be turning for A Small Orange

I am certainly not alone when I say that shopping for a new hosting provider and transferring websites is one of my least favorite aspects of web development. In my experience, switching hosts requires waay too much time and rarely unfolds without significant problems. Nonetheless, when service and/or support turns sour, upgrading to a better host is well worth the effort. In my case, A Small Orange just wasn’t working out.

Everything was going fine for the first several months — excellent service, fantastic support, and consistent, reliable server uptime. However, during the last several months, server uptime frequently dipped below the 98% level, an unacceptable amount of downtime, especially since it generally happened during critical times: peak hours or while I was trying to work on the site. When I finally submitted a support ticket addressing the “unacceptable levels of downtime,” ASO support staff put my mind at ease by moving my site to a “a more stable server.”

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My apologies for recent periods of site unavailability. Apparently, my hosting company is having a difficult time with the server that happens to host Perishable Press. As far as I can tell, the server problems began Wednesday morning (due to a “traffic spike”). By Thursday morning, Perishable Press (as well as a few of my other sites) had been down for a period exceeding eight nonconsecutive hours.

According to my log files, Thursday itself was even worse, with server uptime struggling at an embarrassing 78.7%. And, although Friday looked considerably better, the site continues to experience periods of downtime that inspire me to begin (once again) the arduous process of switching to a more reliable host..

Currently, the site is up, but only after a lengthy period of downtime earlier this morning. I figured I had better post an explanation while I had the chance.. who knows when stability will be restored. To be fair, up until Wednesday, my hosting provider has delivered reliable, consistent uptime. I sure hope they get back into the groove.

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Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:

Update 2011/02/05: ASO is no longer my host. As this article explains, ASO service was great at the start, but after three years quality of service has declined considerably. There are some great people at ASO, but I can no longer recommend them for serious web hosting. For more information, check out my post on switching to Media Temple.</update>

• Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime
• Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth
• Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else

A Small Orange delivers all of the above in every shared hosting plan. ASO provides hosting plans perfect for any size operation:

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There is a major problem with the “Hotlink Protection” feature of cPanel. To summarize the issue, allow me to quote a recent email sent to a completely unresponsive tech support department:

…The problem is that if I try to include any rewrite rules for permalinks, hotlinking, or blocking spambots, cPanel automatically enables its “Hotlink Protection” feature. And, even worse, it automatically adds every URL from every rewrite rule (even the ones for blocking spambots) to its “auto-discovered” list of URL’s for which image access is allowed. This means that every spammer that I am trying to block now has access to my images! If I try to remove the spammers directly from the “allow-image-access” list, the associated rewrite rules are automatically removed from my htaccess file, thus giving spammers full access to my entire site (instead of just access to images). So, it is indeed the case that I can’t add any rewrite rules to my site’s root htaccess file without cPanel automatically assuming that every URL on the page is related to hotlinking and subsequently adding them all to the “allow-image-access” list…

In other words, cPanel screws up htaccess rewrite rules via its “Hotlink Protection” feature. More specifically, spammers and robots that are denied site access via root-htaccess rewrite rules are automatically listed in the “allow access to images” field of the Hotlink Protection panel. Not good. Even worse, disabling Hotlink Protection automatically removes every rewrite rule from the htaccess file. Such bizarre functionality forces the user to choose between complete hotlink protection and other essential features such as pretty permalinks or spam blocking. Pretty sucky if you ask us. Nonetheless, here is a concise summary of the problem with the cPanel Hotlink Protection (cHP) feature:

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Several months ago, we encountered some problems with our hosting company and decided to switch servers. Then, after spending countless hours transferring our army of domains, the new server crashed and our databases were deleted. Further, after the transfer we quickly realized the inferior technological quality of our new host. Thus disgusted, we transferred everything back to our old server and hoped for the best.

For the past several months since then, our original server has been running as well as could be expected, all things considered. All functions were running smooth, the error logs were empty, and all was well and good in cyberspace. Then, suddenly, about two weeks ago, someone gained access and indiscriminately hacked every index file on the server. Expectedly, this created chaos, crashed websites, and left our hard-working server techs scrambling to fix the hole and secure the server.

Immediately after the attack, we began repairing our websites, uploading files, restoring databases, and troubleshooting errors. Then, just as we began to make some progress, the entire server crashed, wiping out all traces of every domain on the server. Deluged with "help tickets" from many customers, our hosting company responded with a form letter indicating the problem and reaffirming us of their support (copied verbatim):

Dear Velued Customer,

today we have experienced 4 hours of downtime due to broken cPanel/RHEL update. Everyday we receive updates from cPanel and RedHat, they are automatically installed on the server. Those are critical patches, software updates etc. Today's nightly upgreade broken whole server due to incompatibility in Bind (Name servers) library. All techs have been working on the issue, it took us some time to locate the problem. In the meantime we find out that more hosting companies has such problems. Finally we were able to fix the issue and the servers are back to normal. If you experience any problems accessing your domain names it may be because you tried to access the server when DNS was down and your local ISPs DNS server couldn't cache the IP address. It may take few hours until your local ISP's DNS server refresh the DNS zone.

You can check that your web site is up and working properly through 3rd party proxy server ie. www.the-cloak.com

The issue affected ALL hosting companies which uses cPanel, for more information regarding the issue please check cPanel forums at:

http://forums[…].com (edited)

We understand your frustration and how it harmed your business however we would like to assure you that we are here 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and if there is anything wrong we will do our best to fix the issue as soon as possible.

Please accept our appology and we hope to offer you best hosting services possible.

Best regards,
Customer Service Manager

Apparently, during the process of cleaning up the aftermath of the server attack, it became necessary to upgrade various components of cPanel and other server software. Unfortunately, the upgrade produced conflicts and subsequently crashed the entire system. Ahhh yeah. Thanks for that form letter.

Several days later, after great stress and concern, the domains were once again online and accessible, enabling customers access to (once again) begin work on the restoration process. Things were finally looking up..

Well almost. After all of our websites had been restored and the dust had settled, several key applications were no longer functional. After an unsuccessful troubleshooting session, we broke down and submitted a help ticket. As it turns out, two vital PHP functions, passthru() and exec(), had been disabled due to security concerns. In other words, thanks to the cracking exploits some mindless showoff, the generous scripting privileges customers once enjoyed have now been restricted.

The good news is that, aside from the loss of a few key functions, everything else is once again up and running considerably well. Looking back, we see how the difficult, stressful, even frustrating events serve as priceless learning experiences. Indeed, managing websites is definitely a challenging endeavour, requiring great patience, flexibility, and determination.

Looking for the perfect dedicated server? Well, “Don’t Just a Dedicated Server!” — “Have Peace of Mind!” with Daily Razor Hosting.

Have a Peace of Mind

After successfully migrating our domains to a new server at WebHostingBuzz.com, we continued writing articles, uploading, embellishing, and fine-tuning everything. Everything seemed fine. At first…

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As you may have read, we recently transferred our websites to a new server. Although the overall process went smoothly enough, several learning opportunities unfolded during the transfer of our humble Perishable Press website…

First, the setup. Perishable Press is a WordPress-powered website. On our previous server, we were running a Fantastico-installed WordPress version 2.0.2, upgraded from version 2.0. Permalinks were enabled and everything was running smoothly. Our database was only 13MB in size and around 12MB of that was disposable statistics information from WP-ShortStat and Bad Behavior. The crucial part of our database was a friendly 1MB in size.

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About a year ago we signed up with a hosting provider that offered one of the best hosting deals around: lots of space, bandwidth, and transfer — plus all of the usual server software amenities that make life easier. Everything went smoothly at first…

In fact, the first six months of service were close to 100%. The few help-ticket items submitted were promptly resolved in a professional manner. We were ready to start some business and everything was going great. Then, about five months ago, we began noticing a serious increase in server downtime. Help tickets were also slow-going and the responses were like these cryptic one-liners that failed to address the actual problem, demonstrating a serious lack of concern and providing virtually no help. Further, multiple emails concerning account billing and renewal went (and remain) completely ignored. Indeed, email remains their only method of communication. At this point, we felt stranded, ignored, and utterly alone. Given this level of service, we were not comfortable hosting websites for our clients.

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