Last two weeks have been extremely busy for me. With the growth in Personal Dividends, and the start of Value Stock Guide and Corporate Wiki, the sites I hope will grow its readership and popularity over time a great deal, I realized that my existing shared hosting at Blue Host was just not enough and did not give me the flexibility that I needed. There were a few other changes I wanted to make. So finally I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my hosting and do a few other things that I have been planning to do for some time.
Personal Dividends, Value Stock Guide and Corporate Wiki are now on a VPS
I chose to go with ServInt as my VPS provider. I considered Media Temple Grid Service and their VPS offering but settled on ServInt as they offered bigger bang for the buck. Better VPS specs than Media Temple for less cost and customer support that is second to none. Moving to VPS from shared hosting does come with a learning curve, but since I have worked in IT in my past (specifically Unix systems), it was not something that was a big deal. Being able to tune the system and set it up exactly the way I needed it to be makes it worth every penny.
The actual move was not to bad either. All these 3 sites run on WordPress. It was a simple case of backing up WordPress databases, and restoring them on the new server, making sure that the mySQL db names and passwords remain consistent. You can even change them, if you know what you are doing, all you need to do is to make sure that you update your wp-config.php with the correct db_name and password. I also moved over all the WordPress files (the entire wp directory). The wait for the nameserver change to propagate was the longest part of the move. I had purchased the domains at BlueHost and decided to leave them there, just updated the nameservers to point to the new location. By my estimates, it too between 24-36 hours for the nameserver change to be fully effective. During this time, a visitor could end up on either Blue Host or ServInt versions of my site but since I did not update the sites with new postings of comments during this time, it was not a big deal.
Personal Dividends has a new look
PD now uses Thesis theme. I bought the developer version as I do plan to eventually move other sites to use this theme. I have found Thesis to be an easy theme to work with and the customization options are extensive. It is written with SEO in mind and hopefully within a few weeks I will know if the theme actually makes a difference in SEO. Still, I love how much cleaner the site now appears and I am sure it has already improved the aesthetics and usability.
Ad serving gets an upgrade
I briefly tried out the OpenX community hosted ad server, found it to be too slow, tried DFP by Google, found it to lack in features. Essentially I wanted a tighter control on who sees what ads, based on the referring site. So for example, I decided not to serve adsense ads to visitors from Social Media sites. No point really, the CTRs for these visitors are close to zero. CPM ads make more sense for them. There were other targeting tune ups as well. Google’s DFP service does not allow me to target based on referrer. So I decided to download and host my own OpenX ad server on a sub-domain. Took me many hours to set it up but it seems to be much faster than the hosted service and I am happy with it. No doubt this will also come in handy with direct ad sales.
There will be more changes and fine tuning in the weeks ahead but I am already happy with the results so far. The sites appear to be much faster and more robust, and more importantly, Google Webmaster Tools show that the average download time for a page is now 1/5th of what it used to be.
