A Move To VPS Hosting

After several months on a shared hosting server, I decided to make a move to a VPS solution. (Virtual Private Server)

This is something I have been planning to do for some time now, as I have clearly out grown my shared hosting. So, over the weekend I decided to make my move.

As some of you may know already, I have had my fair share of performance issues in the past few months highlighted in this post 12 Ways To Optimize Your Blog For Better Performance and as a result, new working practices were discussed to help boost performance.

Although these practices have helped and I would highly recommend them, it doesn’t change the fact that I have a growing blog that has hardware needs.

To put it simply, my blog needed to reside on a bigger high performance server. This has led me to shop around for a better solution.

For most new bloggers, looking to self host, shared hosting is normally the most obvious route as it is cheaper and straight forward to manage. But there will come a time when you would need to scale up.

Business Need

The move to a super-dupa server wasn’t something I particularly wanted, but it was purely a business need.

Page views are quite important to me, and some of my pages were taking forever to load, knowing the patience levels of visitors, I really don’t want to give them a reason to leave.

If you are not capturing your visitors’ attention in the first 5 seconds – forget it. If out of that 5seconds, 4 is spent trying to load your web page, chances are, they probably won’t stick around.

Why VPS Hosting?

Generally, there are three pools of self-hosted servers

Shared Hosting

(Easier to manage, cheap to run, sharing with many other websites, no guaranteed resources)

Virtual Private Servers

(Sharing with limited users, Guaranteed hardware resource, you can configure the server to your taste, cost-effective)

Dedicated Servers

(Your very own dedicated machine, can very expensive to run)

I decided to go for a VPS for better performance and it keeps me in control of my server. I can also host point other domains I own to the server – which is pretty cool.

After several weeks of shopping around, I was undecided which company to go for, in the end I decided to go for a UK based hosting company. Reasons for this would be addressed in another post.

Although, this has only just been rolled out on this blog, I have been using this service for over a month now and I have been impressed with the service and experience so far. I plan use them a bit longer before I start recommending them.

To end off, if you spot anything unusual or out of place, please do let me know