I just wanted to follow up to Thursday’s post about moving off of the (mt) grid to Fuzzy Hosting with a few more details about the move.
Migrating was as painless as you can ever hope for a change in hosting to be. Neither (mt) nor Fuzzy use any funky PHP or Apache configurations, so there wasn’t really anything “different” between the two accounts from the perspective of running Wordpress on them. While migrating, I also took the time to upgrade each blog I moved to Wordpress 2.0.7 - still no problems.
There were two minor inconveniences I ran into during the process, although to call them “problems” would be vast overkill since they were very easily worked around.
-
No SSH Access
Now to be fair, the average user probably wouldn’t call this a “problem”. Still, once you’ve gotten used to using the command line for migrations such as this (thanks to the scp command), it’s a pain in the butt to go back to regular old FTP. Still, not a big deal. In fact, I took the opportunity (while downloading my old content) to download the new version of Wordpress and uploaded it back up to Fuzzy before sending my content up. -
phpMyAdmin Importing
The other issue I had was when re-importing my main blog. With all the statistics information, posts, and comments (none of which I was willing to part with) the database was rather large. The default PHP maxfilesize for an upload is 2MB. Unfortunately, the phpMyAdmin install found in Plesk inherits this setting. My database was too large to download and then upload all in one fell swoop. Instead, I had to do it in pieces, a few tables at a time. Fortunately, none of my tables were single-handedly larger than 2MB (at least when gzip’d) so it wasn’t a real issue.
Like I said, no real issues, but those were the two things that I did notice during the process that could have been slightly more seamless.
Overall I’m thrilled with the service I’ve received from Fuzzy, even if they did complain about one of my WP-Cron scripts (the reminder one, which tests cron by sending emails every 15 to 60 minutes I believe). They went in and deactivated this script, claiming it was sending out a crap-ton of blank emails to no one and that it was overloading their email server. Seems a tad over-exaggerated to me, but it wasn’t a big deal since it didn’t do anything useful anyway. I don’t much care for other people snooping around in my database and deactivating plugins I’m using on my blog, but I suppose it’s one of those things that hosting companies do from time to time (although in the dozen or so I’ve used in the past, no one has ever done such a thing).
Just as a side note to the whole process, at first I was going to dump a few of my more critical sites onto my Dreamhost account, just to get them up and running. Over the past several months, my Dreamhost account has been rock-solid, while (mt) has experienced massive amounts of downtime on their grid product1. Unfortunately, the Dreamhost panel was so unresponsive during the two days in which I was considering the move that I was forced to abandon that plan. I wasn’t really planning on getting yet a 3rd hosting account, but I’m glad that Fuzzy was there to help me get my sites back up and running.
UPDATE: Correction. Fuzzy Hosting doesn’t have an upload limit of 2MB on their phpMyAdmin installs. Apparently I mis-read the display (which I believe usually shows 2,048 KB):
