October 22nd, 2007
[UPDATE: In June of 2010 I moved One-Button Mouse over to Slicehost (referral link). Media Temple started having way too many problems - my sites were going down way too frequently, they actually got hacked and many of their hosted sites - mine included - were subjected to exploits by the hackers. I may do a more lengthy post on this at some point, but for now let's just say that I don't feel comfortable recommending Media Temple.]
It took a few days, but everything went surprisingly well, as far as I can tell.
Over the weekend I moved onebuttonmouse.com from Dreamhost to Media Temple. Dreamhost was great for the first few years I used them – excellent price, responsive customer service, and any problems were few and far between. Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, that changed. Two of my sites went down three separate times earlier this month, sometimes taking my email service along with them, and that was the last straw.
So over the weekend I packed up the code, dumped the data, and carted everything on over to Media Temple. It’s been weird getting used to how another webhost runs things, but their support people have been very helpful, and they even have 24-hour phone support.
I should also mention an extremely useful article by David Seah, in which he detailed his own move over to Media Temple. Reading over his process really helped me organize my thoughts on how to go about the move, and his post also gave a bit of concrete technical info that saved me a lot of time in one instance – namely his command-line database dump, which I used to get the data out of my Mint database after DNS server propagation left me without easy access to Dreamhost’s web-based mySQL admin tool.
I still have a few other sites to switch over, but I’m not too worried now that this one is out of the way. In the meantime, let me know if you see any problems with the site.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Testing comments…
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 am
Now you’re scaring me. I just moved 20 of my web sites over to DreamHost from ASmallOrange.com. ASO’s downtime was killing me and I wanted for space and bandiwdth for the $$$. I hope it wasn’t a bad move.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Sorry Matthew. For what it’s worth, I maintain a couple of sites on a separate, secondary Dreamhost account, and they don’t seem to have as many problems as the sites under my main account were having. Of course, I don’t check in on them nearly as frequently, so I could just be missing the problems. Hopefully you’ll have a better experience than I did.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:34 am
I feel your pain. I moved all of my sites from Dreamhost to Media Temple a few months ago because of similar problems, although my last straw was when a hacker got ahold of many Dreamhost FTP user account logins and passwords, including mine. I spent a few days searching through all my files deleting garbage the hacker inserted.
My experience on a (dv) server took a bit getting used to, but I’m enjoying it… except Plesk. I just bypass Plesk all together using ssh. If you ever have to mail SWSoft for support on Plesk don’t even attempt it. You get a reply in broken English asking for payment for support. Sadly, Parallels was bought out by the same company…
December 12th, 2007 at 11:35 am
This is not the first time I hear such things of dreamhost. I have a friend that seems to be having the same problems with dreamhost. He has a fairly popular site and is seriously considering switching to a different hosting.
As for me, I use 1and1, which I have heard horrible things about, but I’ve been with them for over a year and it has been great, not to mention their super cheap prices. But then I mainly own fairly small sites…