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.

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Host Your WordPress Blog Locally

If you regularly tweek your blog’s design, layout or test plugins – I would recommend having a local version of your blog.

Hosting locally means running a duplicate copy of your live blog on your local machine. In other words, your PC becomes your web and database server.
Having your own development area is a bit like having your own playground, with freedom to test and tweek as you please without affecting the live system. Web developers generally adopt this approach before deploying.

Hosting your blog locally is a very straight forward process, and would require the following;

• Installing a web server on your computer.

• Creating a database.

• Downloading the latest version of wordpress.

• Tweeking one wordpress file.

There are several ways to achieve this, but one the easiest ways is using a tool called XAMPP, which happens to work across most operating systems.

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