Transferring Servers

In between all of my art-related projects, I’ve been work­ing on two other web­sites that’s still under wraps. I’ve dis­cov­ered a lot of tech­niques recently (both Word­Press and server-related) that should speed upload times and respon­sive­ness of the pages being served. Unfor­tu­nately, I haven’t had the time to imple­ment these tricks on this web­site. I’ll write about these tech­niques later. I can say that the upcom­ing arti­cle will con­tain a lot of use­ful tricks to help any­one inter­ested in opti­miz­ing their web­sites. I’ll also need to update a list of the plu­g­ins I’ve since aban­doned and oth­ers that I’ve recently dis­cov­ered. At some point, you’ll all prob­a­bly see a 503 Hold­ing Page go up. I’ll be using the Main­te­nance Mode Plu­gin for Word­Press here as the splash page while the con­tent gets ported on over.

There’s been talk recently (this has actu­ally been going on for years but has reached a new plateau as of recent) that Google is going to start putting an empha­sis on web­site load speeds. In other words, the faster your web­site, the higher rank­ing you may receive. Google said in the past that this wasn’t a deter­mi­na­tion in their rank­ing algo­rithm, but that’s not to say it won’t change in the future. Last year alone, Google made over 200 tweaks to their code in order to deter­mine a website’s posi­tion on the Inter­net. They also rolled out a few new items that mea­sured website’s speeds — per­haps to answer Yahoo’s speed nanny Yslow. All this recent news seems like faster speeds at some point will become a deal-breaker for a lot of site. So speed is some­thing that any­one who wants their web­site to be seen should really start con­sid­er­ing. Besides, it’s been proven and stud­ied that faster speeds keeps a reader’s reten­tion longer.

One of my web­sites, HDR­Source, needs to be on a more sta­ble plat­form con­sid­er­ing that it has a built-in store­front and all the down­loads need to run more smoothly and reli­ably. LunarStu­dio is my main web­site — and it’s very heavy when it comes to images. It also ranks in the top 10 for over 50 Google search terms and phrases which means heavy traf­fic. Heavy traf­fic means slow speeds. There’s also this blog and three oth­ers that will also need to be ported.

While I loved my old (and cur­rent) Total Choice Host­ing, they’re start­ing to run on some out­dated tech­nolo­gies. Their ser­vice is tech­ni­cally fine for most peo­ple, but the dif­fer­ence in speed is notice­able if that mat­ters to you. I think one of the main fac­tors in their appar­ent crawl is their lack of sup­port for a com­pres­sion tech­nique called gzip which is han­dled by the server tech­nol­ogy. I talked with their tech­sear­lier, and they sim­ply will not enable it. Gzip can com­press a web­site up to 80% — that’s serv­ing a web­site almost twice as fast. The other thing is the lack of dis­trib­uted host­ing — this is pro­cess­ing a page out from mul­ti­ple com­put­ers ver­sus a sin­gle server. This also means speed and the abil­ity to han­dle get­ting crushed if some­one on national news decides to plug your website.

I’m really set on giv­ing the web­site host­ing ser­vice Medi­atem­plate a try. After talk­ing with a few peo­ple, I’ve become impressed with their server sys­tem which uses dis­tri­b­u­tion (bet­ter pro­cess­ing under heavy loads), over­all load times, and even tech­ni­cal sup­port. I’ve also been astounded by a few of the web­sites I’ve seen hosted with them. Medi­atem­plate lacks some of the pomp and con­ve­nience of the Fan­tas­tico con­trol panel which shipped with Total Choice, but I’m sure almost all of the func­tion­al­ity is there  under dif­fer­ent pages and buttons.

The cost of Mediatemplate’s ser­vice is $20/month cur­rently and you can host up to 100 sites on their servers per account. That’s unheard of. I’ll be sav­ing roughly $25/month in that alone by con­sol­i­dat­ing all of these sites. They will also host up to 100 gigs of website-related files — that’s per­fect for the HDR­Source store and means that I’ll be sav­ing an addi­tional $10/month for my exter­nal file host­ing on 4shared and Medi­afire. So there will be $35/month in sav­ings, and a much, much speed­ier host to boot.

How can you go wrong with that? Well, I’m more than happy to be the prover­bial guinea pig  here. They have a 30-day money back guar­an­tee in case it turns out to be less than expected