It’s amazing how a few ailments such as an ear infection, a jaw ache, and a few other unpleasantries can vacu-suck out the incentive to do anything but crawl into bed and cry into my pillow girlfriend’s cottonly lump until I fall asleep.
Until of course, my blog suddenly decided to crap all over itself. You probably hadn’t noticed since it was all happening in the backend, but there was also a significant deterioration in load times as well.
It got to the point where I’ve finally become fed up with my blog’s slow response time. I don’t want a blog that takes 10 seconds to load. I want it to load as instantaneously as Google’s home page does, and without having to sacrifice any of my beloved plugins to make it happen either.
So I spent last weekend not only working the backend of my blog to fix the problems, but also on optimizing all the ad space I could possibly squeeze out of my blog. For whatever reason I felt compelled to check off all the projects I wanted to do to completely monetize the site, and I’m happy to announce that it’s all finished. The only thing left on the plate is to apply for two more advertising networks once I have enough traffic to qualify.
With all that out of the way now, it is time for my beloved blog to finally move out and find itself a better home. I found a potential VPS hosting service with high marks for support and server performance that may suit me perfectly, including a very high ceiling for growth. Unfortunately it also means my once $10 a month deal to host my site will now cost me $60 a month, but since I already make roughly $100 a month now in blog earnings, I’m going to consider this a small investment that will significantly boost the site’s performance and appropriately prepare it for a larger audience (if it ever comes).
I may start the migration as early as tomorrow, so blogging will be light for the next few days until the migration is complete. Hopefully by this weekend I’ll be happily sipping on hot chocolate while surfing my blog and admiring my newly juiced up server. :-D
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Did you move servers? Is the URL the same?
Yep, I moved to a different server and the URL is the same. What a pain though.
Have you moved? Your blog’s loading up nicely now — no more delays and I actually see your content as it is, without having to refresh a few times.
US$100/month is really decent moolah! I took a year to make that…
Yes, it is faster Linc.
Yep, it’s settling in now, but wow what a headache. I’m also disappointed that the CPU usage is so high just to load the home page. I have no idea why, but I have to assume the server’s not at fault, but a plugin that is simply hogging too many resources. There were a few cron jobs that were being ridiculously bad, so I just ripped them out. Once I did that I was able to use the server’s ability to compress my PHP AND my javascript and CSS files, something I couldn’t do on shared hosting. Having direct access to the server side of things was an eye opener, to say the least.
Yaaaay!