Debian Tips & Tutorials

Majority of bloggers and website owners choose shared hosting packages for hosting their blogs and websites. But as traffic increases the server begins to choke. You will see plenty of internal server errors, CPU over usage messages etc. Then you will find emails from the shared hosting company telling that your website/blog is not suitable for shared hosting. Here I will explain how you can migrate your websites to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). VPS is also called as Virtual dedicated server. In a VPS you can do everything like what you can do in a dedicated server. VPSes are cheap when compared to dedicated servers and have a better resources (CPU, bandwidth, storage). Lets start.

1. Find the best VPS hosting company.
2. Buy a package which satisfy your needs. You can choose your favorite GNU/Linux distro while purchasing. You will also get a static IP.
3. Note down the things to be migrated (database, static files, CMS)
4. Setup the VPS. install required services. write proper firewall rules. tune your vps to get the maximum out of your VPS.
5. Copy the files from shared hosting to VPS. This will take a considerable amount of time. Some shared hosting servers won’t give you shell access. This is the most worst condition. You will have to download the files to your local computer and then copy the files to the VPS. If you have shell access you can copy the files using ssh.
6. Dump the database, copy it to the new VPS and restore it.
7. Point your domain name to the VPS. You can do this by going to domain control panel and fill the A record of your domain with the IP of the VPS. It is better to change the TTL to a lower value before the migration so that it will take only a less time to spread the domain change throughout the internet name servers.

You can host unlimited websites and blogs in your VPS provided it will not affect your server performance.

Remember VPS is an unmanaged service. You have to manage your VPS yourself. Some companies offer paid support.

Recommended VPS hosting companies

www.vps.net
www.linode.com
www.slicehost.com

If you need any support for migration, optimization send an email to me at: contact [at] sreenadh [dot] in

Please don’t forget to drop your valuable feedback and suggestions about this post.

No related posts.