Recently, I decided I was paying far too much for my web hosting package with Heart Internet UK, especially considering that they lacked support for some really important features such as Trackbacks and Pingbacks in Wordpress and did not support Subversion (useful for testing the latest development version of Wordpress). Despite having excellent customer support, the servers were often slow and the setup was a bit clunky – it was time to make a move!
Luckily, my friend Jacob over at jdpictures.co.uk was also a former Heart Internet customer itching to move to a better host. He had done some research and recommended Media Temple’s Grid Service hosting to me. Whilst I’m not going to go deep into the details of this new state of the art hosting technology, basically it means that if your site gets a spike in traffic, the server setup will immediately adapt to deal with it – meaning that your site should never slow down or be suspended. Media Temple also allows you to map multiple domain names to one hosting account for free (so sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk, jdpictures.co.uk etc. can all be hosted on one server). This basically means that me and Jacob are able to share a hosting package with Media Temple (and share the costs) without having to make any compromises whatsoever.
Jacob decided to sign up for the service and give it a test – since then we have both been progressively migrating our files and databases over to the new server and making changes to the DNS records. Finally sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk and radotages.co.uk (i.e. all my sites) are now hosted on Media Temple and I will shortly be cancelling my Heart Internet account for good.
So far, I have encountered very few problems during the migration and am impressed with the speed of the new servers. The Media Temple control panel is very smooth and easy to use and some of the new features that weren’t provided by Heart Internet have already come in handy. I have been using an SSH shell to transfer my files between servers (using rsync) and also used the shell for database dumps and imports which has made the transfer a breeze. It is of course possible that there are a few hiccups that I’ve not spotted – so if you notice anything unusual then please let me know (leave a comment).
To think that I have been forking out so much cash to Heart Internet each month when all along I could have got more for less is quite frustrating – but at least I’ve made the move now…
