The Lab – Same Address – New Host

New Home Same Address

I mentioned yesterday I had just finished migrating my main RE blog to Bluehost when the notice about WP 3.1 came through.  Today, I moved the Lab itself to Bluehost.  If you saw the screen to the right when you tried to get to the Lab it was during those few minutes of silence when the DNS records are being updated.

Server Crash at GD

About two weeks ago I noticed all my sites on my GoDaddy hosting package were down. They were down long enough I called Tech support to find out what was going on (they were down over an hour at that point). They were aware of the issue and were working on getting them back online.

It was about another 30 minutes and all the sites were back online. But the page load times were all increased by about a second from what they had been before the crash. So you are thinking “A second, is that a big deal?” Yes, it’s a big deal.

I have page load tracking time in my footer so I can look at the page source and see how long it takes any page on my site to load. The heavy hitter is usually the homepage with all the content it has on it. (What’s a good time? Under 1 second, acceptable, under 3 seconds, over 7 seconds, WAY TOO LONG)
The main site had been loading at about 2 to 2.7 seconds.  After the crash that went up to 3.5 to 5 seconds.  I had a test install on bluehost and the load time for the exact mirror content was 1 second.  It wasn’t because the database was laid down clean.  I tried that on GD with no change in page load time.  Therefore, I decided to migrate the site.

Turbo Charged at Bluehost

The Lab (on the same hosting package saw the same results)  so this afternoon, I exported the DB and imported it to a new 3.1 install on Bluehost.  Now it is zipping along with the page load time at 1 second.  The fastest I’ve ever seen it.  The nice thing.  Bluehost has lots of compression routines in place that I had to manually configure in the php.ini file on GD and add a couple of plugins and more code in the header to accommodate some compression and that was to get it down to 2.7 seconds.

Now the lab is on a new host, with a new install of WP 3.1 and zipping along nicely.  Both the admin and front end are faster.

Next up.  What I’ve discovered so far with WP 3.1

Is it safe to upgrade to 3.1?

If you are already on 3.0.5 on Linux hosting, yes, it seems really stable. I’ve had no issues yet with anything except one MU install which needed a plugin update to be compatible with the new Super Admin menu under 3.1.

DISCLOSURE:
The link at the top of the sidebar to Bluehost is an affiliate link. It is the only one I have. There are other good hosting companies. But I simply love the CPanel and speed of bluehost tech support and the ease of navigation to get things done inside bluehost.