After much input from many of my colleagues, I have decided to move all of my DeShong.net sites and services to Slicehost. I’ve been with DreamHost for almost three years now, but decided it was time for a change. Among the factors in this are:
- I want to move my email hosting to Gmail for Domains – it seems far superior to DreamHost nowadays
- DreamHost seems to be somewhat oversold; performance on my shared hosting package is pretty poor
- DreamHost recently moved me to a new server, which is fine, but my existing PHP CGI setup broke (which I had done during the days when they were still running PHP 4 as a module, but I wanted more custom configuration control)
- I never had enough control over my LAMP setup, which has always bugged me. I wanna’ run APC, Memcached, etc.!
- I’ve hosted all of my personal photos at Flickr for quite some time now, so I no longer need an old, crufty Gallery2 installation.
So, Slicehost gives me less physical resources (on their smallest slice, which is 256 MB RAM, and 10 GB storage), but they’re dedicated resources, so the performance is better. No oversold, shared hosting boxes for me, thanks!
Also, I get root access to the virtual machine. I tend to shy away from virtual machines, but they are all the rage these days. I figure I should give it a whirl, eh?
Anyways, I’ve carefully migrated all of my DNS to Slicehost, my Subversion repository, my Wordpress blog, and my Wiki, along with some other odds and ends. I also have chosen to not take some of my friends’ domains with me over to Slicehost due to the limited storage, so…sorry, guys!
So, if you notice anything funky, let me know. Otherwise, all existing URLs should work, so things should be completely transparent for the most part. I’ll get my Gmail email cutover done next week, but my MX records will still point to DreamHost for another week or so.
Wish me luck!