So over the past week I’ve been moving all my websites onto a new VPS server. With our upcoming house move, we will no longer have an 80/20 fibre line for me to host things on so a server was required. I looked at going back to plain web-hosting, but it doesn’t generally give the flexibility to host a number of websites over multiple domains, or the ability to host multiple different databases; VPS gives you all this, as you get an entire virtual server with either RDP or SSH access, depending on your choice of OS.
The VPS market is a bit of a minefield however with different companies offering similar solutions but at very different prices. Linux is easy and cheap, but as soon as you want a Windows VPS then it gets more complicated and expensive. I eventually settled on a company called aspnethosting who appear to be based out of the US, but offer UK billing.
All my sites were transferred via FTP and sql export, which gave me the chance to upgrade my PHP and MySQL versions whilst eliminating any downtime – although trying to remember the correct permissions for everything was fun. Surprisingly, everything just worked once the DNS was transferred over – although I’m still investigating a possible performance issue with the gallery website.
Now all I have to hope is that I’ve made a good choice, and that the host doesn’t disappear off the web anytime soon…