The Food Pornographer is changing web hosts

I’ll be changing web hosts very soon.

For the past almost-five years I’ve been on shared hosting. Until recently, the service from my current web host has been very good – I wouldn’t have stayed with them for so long otherwise. It took me a while to realise, but as this blog continues to grow, my hosting needs have changed – this site has outgrown the shared hosting environment.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but for the past few months, I’ve been dealing with a number of problems related to my web hosting. Most of the problems have affected me/the site behind the scenes, but I wanted to address the web hosting issue before there was a noticeable and/or negative impact on my readers. So it’s time for a change.

I took my time to research the options and considered the different kinds of hosting available (VPS, cloud, dedicated and managed/unmanaged plans). I’ve stuck with US-based hosting as prices for Australian-based hosting are still very expensive. US-based hosting gives me better value for money and the site will still have room to grow.

I’ll be moving to fully managed cloud hosting at Storm on Demand.

Without getting into too many details, here’s what it means for you:

  • The web address of this site will not change. I’ll still be at www.thefoodpornographer.com. For the more technically minded, yes, the DNS will have to change – from my current web host’s domain name servers to my new host’s domain name servers.
  • A day or two before the move, I will be closing comments at the site. Once everything has been copied over and is working from my new hosting account, I will enable comments again.
  • While the move is in progress (and until the DNS has switched over to Storm) you will see a notice on the homepage about the move. You will know once everything has been successfully moved and is working from my new host because the moving notice will be gone and you will be able to comment again.

With luck, there will be minimal downtime. My new web host will be helping me with the process. It’s a bit of a pain to change hosts and I don’t mind admitting I find it kind of scary. But I know it will be so much better for the site (and for you guys) in the long term. Hopefully after this I won’t need to do it again for a while.

I hope to move the site towards the end of this week/next weekend. During the move itself I won’t be able to update this site, but I will let you know how things are going at Facebook and Twitter.

Fingers crossed!

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