The move has been put into effect. There may still be some tidying up to do, but most stuff is working on the new server.

I  moved Information Please Articles into its own space under its own domain name. It was a sub-domain space site, but the name was available so I snagged it. The new site is: http://informationpleasearticles.com/ I am thinking of adding a blog on article writing/marketing on the space as well. (Just what I need, another blog that I should write something in on a regular basis!!) Earlier today in response to a forum question I ran the old and new sites through a diagnostic site. The new site loaded 25% faster than the old site, and faster loading is a good thing.

I also moved the Home Remedies, The Closet Online, and The Live Sound Wiki to the new space. The only one that presents a problem is the Home Remedies site. I had updated the site since the database move, so I am missing a bit of content right now. That is part of the tidying up that needs to be done. It took a while for the DNS change to propagate, but I am seeing traffic to all of the sites now.

I will probably post more details later.

I got the new hosting space. There was a problem with FTP at first but that cleared eventually. I uploaded my article directory site to the new server. I had been concerned about the time that it would take because of the size and the download time that I had experienced, but the upload time seemed to be about the same if not slightly faster than the download.

The real battle here has turned out to be the moving of the database. There is a synchronize function built into phpMyAdmin that should do the job if I can figure out the right data to fill in the blanks. I have done web searches and looked at the phpMyAdmin documentation, but everything that I have found is above my level. If I don’t find something that I can understand maybe I will write something up (before I learn enough so that what I write will be above a beginners head).

I looked things over and saw export and import options and thought that things would be easy. These seem like they would work fine with lighter weight databases but there seems to be about a 50 MB limit and my database that I need is over 250 MB. I had thought of a possible work-around, but it was going to be a lot of work, and this is just the beginning as I will need to move a couple of other sites to the new space as well.

While poking around in phpMyAdmin I noticed a synchronize tab. I investigated and it sounds like it will do what I need to do. There are some settings that are a bit unclear so I will need to gather a bit more information. I may even need to make a couple of calls to support as the new space is with a different hosting company.

Stay tuned for another episode in the saga of the great website transfer, soon! As soon as I get this working I will even give you the new address (link) so that you can check out my labors and see if you can find any problems.

I am delinquent in posting once again! I have been playing with my sites but not documenting my progress here.

When one first embarks on a journey as a Hobby Webmaster one of the first things to do, if the hobby gets serious, is to open a hosting account. I started out on free space offered by my ISP, but soon outgrew that generous allowance. Many would be fine with the amount of space offered by that account, but I like pictures and music, so the file sizes can take  up too much space. The word ‘unlimited’ begins to sound good when you know that there will be a lot of big files that you may wish to host.

I opened a hosting account on one of the *unlimited* hosts. I did read the TOS, but the fine print there didn’t ring any bells. I have recently run into the limits of my unlimited hosting account, so I will be buying additional hosting and moving some sites – a new adventure.

What are the limits to unlimited hosting? There are a few things listed in the terms of service documents that can get you into trouble. These limits are entirely within reason and should cause average users no problem, but they do exist. There are specific limits placed on resources usage. The shared hosting environment must allow all sites hosted on the server to have a reasonable level of service. If one account is a resource hog it can affect other users on the server. The specific resources are CPU usage and Memory usage, although the CPU usage is the most critical today because of relative low memory prices.

There will also be a (large) limit on the number of files hosted within the account. My current account has an absolute limit of 200,000 files and I am pushing that limit. The limit that has caused me problems is the number of tables in the databases. There is also a maximum size for databases, but that is not yet a problem.

I first ran into problems a few months ago. At the time I deleted all unused databases and disabled one unused forum. All was well with the world. Then a couple of my installed softwares came up with updates. I ran the updates without questioning the outcome. Soon my sites were locked again because I had exceeded my number of tables limits. The updates had added tables as part of their update process. I disabled my other two forums because they now have over 60 tables each. Deleting those tables (after taking a backup) got me back under the table limit and the sites were live again in just over one hour (the time to investigate the problem and decide what to do – the sites were live immediately when the hosting company had done that table audit and lifted the lock).

When the problem first arose I investigated options. The real solution to the problem is to go for VPS hosting. I am not quite ready for the expense of that option at this time. The short-term solution will be another shared hosting account and moving some of the sites to the new account. That will be a new adventure and I will try to document it here.