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Virginia Right! Moves to New Dedicated Server

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Welcome to the new home of Virginia Right!

We are now in our third year of covering mostly politics, a few sports and an occasional non political happening or two. We have made a lot of friends (not to mention enemies on the left) and have hopefully produced a website that is informative, entertaining and, well, provocative.

As a result, we have reached the point where we have grown beyond a “shared” hosting environment.

When I started Virginia Right! I looked at the available options as far as a platform to host my blog. There are several options, but only two basic choices: use a site that is already set up to run a blog like Typepad or Blogger, or use my own server and load everything myself.

I decided on the latter and initially opted for a hosting provider called LunarPages. You get “unlimited” disk space, bandwidth and support for a pretty low monthly fee. Not a bad option to start out with.

Unfortunately, shared hosting has a down side. If your site gets really busy, it uses more processor time, which everyone on your server shares. When one customer hogs the CPU power, you quickly find that “unlimited” does not really mean “unlimited”. And two days before the 2009 election, I was getting a lot of hits and had become a resource hog on the shared server. So my account was disabled. Right before the big election that marked the turning point in the country’s drift to the left. I was told they would reactivate my site when I fixed the problem. But how can you fix a problem when the site is down? You can’t. So they moved my site to a really slow test server. And what I found was that there were some small tweaks I could do, but the problem was, too many people were reading the blog to keep the CPU utilization under their required level. But LunarPages had already lost me as a customer. Give me some warning, a clue, a hint, but don’t take me out of service.

As soon as I was able to move my site, I did. I ended up going with a shared environment on BlueHost. And BlueHost does things a bit differently. Everything is still unlimited, but if you become a resource hog, they throttle your CPU time down. It may slow things a bit, but the site stays up. BlueHost has a nifty little chart that shows you how many times they have hammered you in the last 24 hours. It turns out that around noon yesterday I was throttled for 20 minutes out of the hour. This works out to 2 seconds on, 1 second off, and repeat. For 20 minutes out of that hour, Virginia Right! was essentially down! In the past 24 hours, I have been down 155 minutes! Over 2.5 hours. And I have already been on my new server for several hours.

And this is a pattern I have been watching grow and grow. I believe (though I have no proof) that BlueHost is massively overselling their already crowded servers. I had reached the point where I was about ready to move to a dedicated solution when BlueHost managed to really piss me off!

I received an email from their technical support team telling me that I am using too much disk space with my backups. It was a polite email, and I was not really aware that there were so many accumulated backups (about 10). So, I went in immediately and deleted all of the backups and asked them to see if that took care of their “running out of space” problem. They thanked me and said it looked good. I told them I had disabled the errant backup plugin and it would not happen again.

All done!

Or so I thought. I received another email from BlueHost the next day telling me my backups violated their Terms of Service and if I didn’t delete them immediately my account would be terminated. And if they found another backup in the future, they would terminate my account and delete all of my files.

I immediately procured a dedicated server with HostGator. That was ready on Thursday and I planned the move for Saturday. Of course, nothing ever goes exactly as planned and  this move was no exception. Moving the blog was not a problem, but I now maintain my DNS servers and they had to be registered as NameServers. There is no cost for this, I am happy to say, but I ended up requesting that my main host name be changed, since the DNS servers use the host name. That was completed last night and I finished up the move this morning.

And Virginia Right! is completely alone on this server! I can use every last drop of CPU if I want. I have complete control of the Linux system and can even reboot the box when I want – remotely.

There were no changes made, other than moving to a new server. The only thing that you should see is a big speed improvement. And now that I have complete control over the entire server I will have a lot more options to do more things with it.

Of course there are still rules and limits. The server has 500GB of hard drive space, which is more than I need, but still a limit. And you are not allowed to operate a pirate site with music files, movies and such. And I believe porn sites are a no no. But those issues will not effect me.

And I don’t have to share!

Works for me!

And hopefully a speedier loading site will improve your experience.

 

 

 


Article written by: Tom White

About Tom White

Tom is a US Navy Veteran, owns an Insurance Agency and is currently an IT Manager for a Virginia Distributor. He has been published in American Thinker, currently writes for the Richmond Examiner as well as Virginia Right! Blog. Tom lives in Hanover County, Va and is involved in politics at every level and is a Recovering Republican who has finally had enough of the War on Conservatives in progress with the Leadership of the GOP on a National Level.


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