Switching to a Virtual Private Server Part Two

Having signed up with Jim and had my initial credit card payment confirmed, I was ready to move one of my sites over to the new server as a test, and I went with this one.

Inmotion Hosting uses Cpanel as the medium through which you manage your server, and although I hadn’t seen it before, it was pretty intuitive in it’s use. From Cpanel, you can administer domains, email, web stats, MYSQL databases and a whole host of other things. I was nervous about trying to load the site onto the new server, as I had never done anything like this before. But by using a combination of the excellent video tutorials on the site, coupled with contacting the help desk via live chat, it didn’t prove hard to do at all. Here’s the process:

• First step was to use FTP to copy all the Drupal files onto my local PC – if you use Worpress, do the same with those files
• Next I backed up the MYSQL database which Drupal (same with Worpress) uses, and then copied it to my local machine, again using FTP
• Once that was done I used Cpanel to create a new MYSQL database on the new server, making a careful note of the name of the new database
• Then I used the import feature in MYSQL PHP Admin to import the data from my local machine into the new database – this meant all my posts, users and so on were on the new server
• Next step was to upload via FTP all the Drupal files, which took a few moments
• The only amendment I had to make to Drupal (or Wordpress) was to tell it to look for it’s data in the new database – easily done via PHP
• Then I went to the temporary URL provided by Inmotion and there was my homepage! None of the links were working of course, but the mere fact that the homepage looked right and had all my recent posts and photos on it meant that the Drupal installation and the database were communicating
• All that remained was to contact my old host and ask them to point the domain at the new server, which they did straight away!

I was a little nervous for the few hours that it took for the DNS change to propogate across the net, but once I was able to ping my domain and see that it was on my new virtual server, I was able to relax as everything was working perfectly.

So what are the benefits so far?

• Speed – the speed is awesome! The site loads in the blink of an eye, and I no longer go wandering off while waiting for a new page. I can dance around the site exactly the way I want to
• Traffic – this has to be a consequence of the speed of a page loading – traffic has gone up over 20%, and this can only be because people are hanging around and reading now, rather than hitting a link and getting fed up with waiting.

Overall, after almost a week, I’m totally satisfied, and I will now load the other two sites onto the new server. It’s more than I really need at this stage, but the service is amazing and I look forward to the day when I can justify a dedicated server from Inmotion.

If you’re thinking of switching your hosting, I can highly recommend Inmotion – they offer all kinds of options from shared hosting upwards, so have a look at them at the link below.

Web Hosting by InMotion Hosting