Switching to a Virtual Private Server Part One

It only seems like yesterday that I was advocating Servage as a great web host and telling you to sign up with their fantastic value shared hosting service.

And if you have a new blog, then go for it – they should see you through your early months, without breaking the bank, whilst you build your traffic and readership. Their plan is simple and works well – they only offer shared hosting, they throw the farm at the account in terms of included features (like wordpress or Drupal that load instantly) and they are incredibly cheap.

For me though, the time has recently come for me to move my blogs on. Traffic on this one, and our travel blog had reached a point where shared hosting wasn’t working. This increase in traffic meant the sites were loading slowly and we were getting too many 404 errors. Alarm bells rang for me when I read somewhere that you can lose a third of your traffic if your page takes more than 3 seconds to load.

So I decided earlier this week that I needed to move to a host who could offer me a virtual private server for my sites, that would be easily upgraded to a dedicated server when the time came.

I invested a lot of time in research on the net, Twittered for advice (are you following me? @mikecj ) and spoke to people I know and trust in the blogging and online marketing business. I ended up with a short list of three potential hosts, all seemingly offering the same services, for around the same price. So I was stuck as to how to make a decision.

I decided to revert to gut instinct, and called all three, to try to get a feel for what they sounded like and what the customer experience felt like. I gave them all the same script, telling them what my needs were, asking some specific questions about support and letting them tell me what I needed.

Inmotion Hosting won hands down. My call was answered by Jim, who has one of those slow, steady Midwest (?) drawls that is so reassuring to my European ears. Jim sounds like the kind of guy who would never panic and who would always have the answers when you need them. In short, he sounds like Mr. Reliable, and that’s exactly what I was looking for. He made me feel that if I signed up with his company, that I would be important to them and that they would do everything to make my experience a good one. I instinctively liked him, and one again the theory that you buy from people you like was proved.

This was Inmotion’s offer – just click the link on top to find out more about them:

VPS Hosting by InMotion Hosting
Plans Starting at Just $39.95/mo
• Full CPanel
• RAID 5 Fault Tolerant Storage
• Data Backups Included
• SSH Access
• Individual Custom Firewall
• 90 Day Money Back Guarantee
• True 24/7 Support
Rated 3 Out of 3 Stars by CNET.com!

Jim took me through the sign up process smoothly, and within a couple of hours an email arrived which took me through the basic steps as to how to set up my new server. Here’s what a VPS is:

• A VPS has totally independent RAM memory and disc space, meaning you are not sharing resources with other sites
• You control your server’s resources according to your own needs
• You can choose your operating system
• Your sever is much more secure than a shared one
• VPS runs much faster than a shared host
• Storage and bandwidth limits tend to be much higher

So, there I was, the proud owner (renter?) of a server somewhere in Washington, and all ready to get on with installing my site on it, and then being able to flick effortlessly from page to page in a nanosecond or two.

Come back in 24 hours to read part two, where I’ll talk you through the process I went through. Better still, please sign up for email updates and I’ll remind you to come back!