Moving Blog from Shared Hosting to VPS Hosting

Last weekend I spent a good 12 hours putting in the new theme on DragonBlogger.com and tweaking last minute widget, logo and minor cosmetic changes until it was just so.

This week my goal was to have DragonBlogger.com migrated to WebSynthesis VPS Hosting.  I first learned about WebSythensis through a Yoast email that they were migrating to this platform and reasons why.  When I saw that Copyblogger owned this hosting solution and uses it, and also a tech blogger I follow Chris Pirillo also uses WebSynthesis then I had to learn more.

WebSynthesis runs on a very different infrastructure than your typical shared hosting, it runs using NGINX web server with PHP-FPM and they have optimized everything for Genesis specifically but many of their optimizations will help other WordPress themes as well.  I originally asked if they supported my Suffusion theme blog as I wouldn’t be using Genesis yet (unless I can find a child theme or pay to design one that looks like my current site).

They said they would host it and see what they can do, now with NGINX none of my redirect statements in .htaccess would work so had to build manual rewrite statements which they implemented for me after telling me how to format them.

The cool thing about WebSynthesis is they give you a web proxy to use so you can test and work on your website on the new hosting provider prior to cutting the DNS name over.  This allows you to import the WordPress database, upload all the content, themes, plugins you need and generally have it 100% operational until the last step is to just change the DNS name records to point to WebSynthesis.

I am still in the progress of testing and finalizing the cutover, but expect to see comparisons and performance test results against the old shared hosting and WebSynthesis to see if it makes that much of a difference.  At first I will use WebSynthesis directly with no cloudflare and no MaxCDN and add those services to see how much of a difference they make as I did with Bluehost Shared Hosting.

I will say the migration guide that WebSythensis provides is excellent, and they also will configure W3 Total Cache for you as per their optimization.  They have good snapshot utilities and they have security monitors in place to help protect your site right from the start.  You do not and cannot use Better WP Security with WebSynthesis as most of it is centered around Apache and NGINX does not have the same configurations/modifications with .htaccess file.