Having successfully moved the entire CogDogBlog site— Lock Stock, And Kibble– to a new home at DreamHost, I started to look at my other online satellites. Since sometime back in say, 1997, I hoisted a personal domain I used for my now retired web consulting business, and also used for personal email and blogging.
But wait a minute, my new DreamHost package at only $8 a month included hosting of multiple domains, a humongous amount of disk space (the whole CDB empire is maybe 300 Mb and I got 200 Gb to start with), it made alot of sense to dump my old host which was abut $20/month.
So it took maybe 2 hours this morning to ftp the 600 Mb of old content over, almost no time to export MySQl databases and to re-import them at the new site, but what really blew me away was when I changed my domain registrar to the new nameserver at DreamHost – it was already available in like 15 minutes! Wow, that DNS change just scooted across the net. Another 5 minutes, I had set up the 6 email accounts. It was a good thing to have done this without interrupting anyone’s email accounts (I hope there is no lag or lost mail).
But wait, there were more savings. For some inexplicable, lazy reason, I had left the old domain registered at Network Solutions (when I first got it, they were the only registrar around!), and they charge an paw and a leg compared to others. Heck, with my new Dreamhost, I get a free registered domain with privacy options, so kaching! I am moving that over as well.
I am very much liking DreamHost’s tools and service!
Welcome to the fold Alan 😛
Once you get more comfortable with Dreamhost’s services and have an itch to play check out their “One-Click Installs”. I’ve set up several wordpress, phpBB, and mambo sites lightning quick using this service. Granted, WordPress is a pretty simple install manually, but it’s nice to just click a few buttons, tell the Dreamhost robot which database you want to use (or have it create one), and then let it do all the work for you. No more FTPing of the install files.
THAT, and the ever-increasing bandwidth and storage space is very nice. I’ll never use the 2500 GB of bandwidth my account currently has, but it’s nice to know I could start my own mp3 download service if I wanted to, hehe.
Another good thing about One-Click Installs – one click upgrades shortly after WordPress makes them available. If you didn’t install with One-Click, you have to manually upgrade. If you did install WP with One-Click, then from your domain management panel, you just click click click to upgrade all your installations of WordPress when the latest version comes out. You’ll get a yourdomain.com.old directory so you can revert if you need to, but I’ve never needed to.
Yikes, should have done that. Oh well, manual makes me feel like a code dude.
Are you happy with Dreamhost so far? I have had nothing but trouble with my host the last three months and my contract is up in a couple of weeks. Was the switch hard? Any advice for me?
Cole,
I am very happy with DreamHost so far– a good web host is one you barely notice 😉 My account was created within minutes of filling out the form, the thing that took the most was ftp-ing over my site’s files (I actually used Fetch to log into both old and new hosts, and dragged entire web directory’s contents form one to the other).
They have great tools available, like one click installs, a very usable control panel, hardly any significant limits (plus you accrue extra disk space and transfer allowance with time, I am no where near my limit). My one request for help (having to do with transferring a domain, and it was really an issue on Network Solutions who I was bailing on) was answered in very short time.
But what was really surprising was that for the rock bottom hosting plan ($8/month, though I paid in advance for 2 years to get that rate), I was able to also move over my personal domain, its email and web site as well, at no extra cost. That saved me another $20/month I was paying elsewhere. And you get a free domain registration, with free domain contact privacy, that again saved me the bucks I was throwing at Network Solutions.
Of course, my run has been less than a month, but all is good– and I chose them based on the raves by D’Arcy Norman (i end up copying many things he does first ;-).
If you sign up, tell them I and/or D’Arcy sent you!
And regarding your weird database errors on your blog– I have never seen a site limit the number of MySQL requests– note that each page load may include anywhere from 10 to 100 calls to the database depending on the number of plugins you run– in my footer that is the number listed as “XX malcontent students of Edward Abbey” XX is really the number of request per page, you get this via:
<?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?>