Have you ever moved a site from one host to another? While moving a small site can be a piece of cake, a large distributed site can be a pain in the *beep*!

Now multiply that by a factor of ten and you will know what I have gone through in the past 24 hours.

This was also one of the reasons I kept putting it off, but when a site’s gotta move, a site’s gotta move!

I won’t go into the details about which sites I moved, but the reason that I faced so much problem was because seven of the sites were all present under one account. All of these had atleast a single database.

These sites I moved to my own VPS. I had delayed the movements for a few months to check the stability of the VPS and I am pleased with it. It’s just my site that causes things to go haywire, no blaming the VPS for that!

My other sites, including the support forum, have been moved under the reseller account I have with my good friend Everton Blair. These totalled some four in number.

All the work hasn’t yet been done and some still remains. DNS issues are still to be resolved and that should get done once the site propagates.

Next step is terminating all the old accounts and my hosting account with my old provider as well.

While on the topic of computers, a less stressful end of this evening was the arrival of my new 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disk, this makes my hard disk space 450GB in all. I’m giving my old Samsung drive to a friend. 450GB doesn’t seem much when around 150GB will just go in a direct backup of all my stuff!
But, I’m pleased

After having thought about it a while I’ve decided to use Google Apps for Your Domain for AjayDSouza.com.

I have already been using Google Apps to manage WebberZone email for a while now, and now AjayDSouza.com

What this means is now I have a 2Gb Email account, which has all the features of Gmail (which IMO is second only to Yahoo! Mail).
This is very useful because I can take a considerable load of my VPS. I have also found that Gmail’s anti-spam tools are a lot better than SpamAssassin.
I also have complete POP and SMTP access if I need to download any email.

I can also use my email address with Google Talk and Jabber.

Though I doubt I will use this, but I also have my very own Google Calendar for events.

One thing I don’t need is Google Page Creator.

The best thing is:

Organizations accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.

I have already added mail checking for my email to Netvibes. This will replace the default POP Mail account I was using.

If you look to using Apps for your domain and want to check email at Netvibes, then use the Gmail Module.

WordPress.com today released Domain Registration and Mapping for your WordPress.com blog.

This is a paid addon. Only mapping with your existing domain is $10/year. If you don’t have a domain name you can register and map it for $15.

There was a time I would have taken this service. However, I no longer maintain and update my WordPress.com Blog as much as I hoped to.

Besides, I prefer having complete control over my blog and have plenty of space to host any future initiatives.

But, it could work out to be a very useful service for those who want the convenience of hosting their own blog, letting someone else do all the maintenance and having your own domain as well!
Look at it as a blog hosting service at $15/year. You won’t find such a low-priced host anywhere

Original Blog Post.

Haven’t had much time the past week to actually sit down and patiently blog.

So what have I been busy with?

Studies

For one, a good portion of my day has gone in studying. It can be both fun and frustrating at times!

My study partner came over one day and I went to her place the next day. Her mum cooks well

VPS

Besides the studies the rest of the day has been spent working on my new VPS. Once again I have decided to plunge into the world of VPSes. The last time I tried it out, I faced with much failure.

Gave up the idea of VPSes, but after the scam called Webhostplus (which took over Netbunch) X(, I was on the lookout for a good Reseller Plan or VPS. Always must have your sites spread out.
After a great deal of research I settled with Future Hosting.

Guess the bad luck of VPSes has followed me out here as well, because the the node on which my VPS was on gave some problems and my VPS in particular decided to act up!
The support out there (let me mention Vik in particular) were quick to act on this. Even better that a new VPS created for me on another server.

I’m back online again. Will be moving this blog there soon.

And this will be the new home of WebberZone.

And exams

Gave the AIMCAT this Sunday. Turned out to be a 180 mark paper. What I really like about T.I.M.E. is that every paper so far has been a surprise. This is really getting me mentally prepared to expect just about anything from the CAT.

The paper was good. Actually did a good deal of solving in DI. Verbal was a bit difficult and did run out of time for Maths.

Results are out Wednesday evening so will come to know how I stand.

So, that is how life stands currently.
Will try and keep this blog a lot more updated with my personal life. Also need a lot more pics online.

Update: I seem to be getting a open_basedir restriction in effect problem on the sites. The individual demoblogs seem to be working. The domains too don’t seem to be fully propagated.

Update 2: The problem has since been fixed. Apache sure can be funny at times!

I have been able to restore the Support Forum and my Demo Blogs after it being down for nearly five days.

The server it was hosted on went down suddenly and my former crappy host did absolutely nothing about it inspite of repeated reminders.

I only got a “We are looking into the problem” and after two additional reminders a “Sites are being restored from a backup” response from them.

The backup turned out to be more than a month old and as a result, all the posts and entries from both the forum and blogs have been lost. I made a mistake by not regularly backing up. Lesson learnt.

It doesn’t end there! Even though the server did come up, the sites are still not up. I was totally frustrated and did the next best thing of moving the sites to WebberZone Web Solutions.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused. Please feel free to repost any queries that you might have in the forum.

When I went to sleep at 1am on Monday morning, I thought I finally won the battle with my VPS for ajaydsouza.com

To cut a long story short, when I checked my site yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, I faced major problems accessing it. When I was able to all I got was No posts and loads of 404s.

Couldn’t do much all day long but sat with it after I returned home around 7.30pm.

Tried restarting the server to find that mysql wouldn’t start. Seems I was locked out of /tmp even without touching it!

Thankfully challii from AS Hosted came to my rescue and patiently help me debug. Temporarily changed the /tmp location to get mysql working and I was able to take a complete backup of this site.

He then moved the site to an account I have here. (Helps to have your own accounts at several hosts).

However, awaking this morning I found that it still threw a database error. Found out that the database hadn’t migrated due to differences between the phpMyAdmin and mySQL versions. Fixed all that and I am up online.

I’m a little disheartened by the entire VPS deal. Additionally, the staff where I currently have the VPS haven’t yet responded to the ticket. I know I troubled them in the past, but this time I didn’t even touch the account.
Am rather irritated and may move to another VPS.

However, this is some decision that is going to take a lot of pondering, especially since I will have to pay atleast $50/mo for this.

I don’t know if the server here will bear the load, am going to evaluate this for the next few days and then take a decision.

Like my upgrade to WP2.0.2, this was another inevitability.

Like I mentioned earlier, my host had begun to complain about me loading their server.

I guess I’m not the only one facing a similar kind of problem. Andreas too had to move to a VPS recently.

After a great deal of research and debating. Research to find a good host and debating because now I will be spending around six times as much money as of last week and fourteen times as much as of last month!

Well, I’m hoping my donations and ads are able to sustain this.

And I have grabbed this opportunity to offer cPanel Hosting plans through WebberZone Web Solutions. The site is under development, but you can contact me regarding the same.

The site movement is complete. Had problems with WP-Cache and my permalinks during the move. Everything seems to be fixed for now, however, if you find anything amiss please do let me know.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the popularity of this site has gotten so high, that my host has started to complain that I am loading their server.

I don’t blame them because I can see my stats and was worried about it for a while.

I have already installed WP-Cache 2 but I don’t think it is helping that much.

Hence, the need for a good VPS. So folks out there who are using a VPS, please suggest a good, reliable and cost effective VPS provider. I’ve got a rather tight budget (unless my donations start increasing).

Please consider this to be a very urgent requirement!

I will not agree with this statement always but in this case I will.

When I posted What is so special about this photo? I didn’t expect it to get as popular as it turned out to be!

For one it made it as the No. 1 post on Reddit.com with 299 ups and 26 comments at the time of this post. Missed a screenshot at no. 1, but on the left is no. 2

Additionally, it got 46 diggs and 20 comments on Digg.com and also made it on del.icio.us Popular list.

Lastly, I have secured the no. 1 position on Indian Bloggers with hits over six times that of the site on No. 2.

Well, what this actually meant was that my 200 unique visitors averaging blog was had 2,850 on Saturday, 9,295 on Sunday and over 4000 so far on Monday.
My bandwidth usage spiked so high that in the last 48 hours I have consumed almost 50% of my bandwidth (I have a very old account here).

This has made me realize that I have to move my site to another server. Have been contemplating and putting this for quite a while now. And have finally taken up the Corporate account at WebberZone Business Hosting Solutions.

I am currently moving the site there and a few comments may be lost during this transition.

My support forum will remain hosted here.

My demoblog where I test my themes and plugins now takes a new name. I have moved AjayDSouza.net from my WordPress.com site to the demo blog. It also takes on a new name. The old link will redirect you.

That is just about the changes happening right now. Expect a better look to the blog in the near future. However, no time limit for the same.

Update: Have created a new Donate page