I’ve maintained a Dedicated Server with some friends for a few years now. First we were with 1&1. That turned out to be a disaster from the get go. Their support was unbelievably bad and we had all kinds of problems getting things setup. Our server eventually got turned in to a zombie spammer by some botnet. At that point we decided to move to Server Beach. The quality of their service and systems was much better. We stayed with them for the last two years and it was a solid two years. But once again, our server was recently zombified by a botnet. This time it was more our fault for neglecting server upgrades/patches for nearly a year.

Our focus previously was to have a server we could develop custom sites for through our company (Binary Moon Studios). Having a Dedicated Server allowed us to host our client’s sites and have a sandbox that we had a lot of control over. It worked out pretty well. As BMS is a freelancing outlet, the throughput of business varies widely based on what we are all up to with our regularly scheduled lives. We’ve all been pretty busy so we haven’t sought out new contracts or clients. These days we are mostly hosting personal sites and that has shifted our server needs.

This time we decided to get away from having a Dedicated Server and move to a managed/shared solution. I keep seeing tweets about people loving Media Temple. I checked them out and now we’re in the middle of migrating to them. The two big factors in choosing them was their virtualized “grid” structure and the fact that it was a managed account (we are no longer responsible for maintaining the server). Most hosts have you rent a physical box and you don’t have an easy way to upgrade it - upgrades usually mean migrating to another psychical box. With Media Temple we aren’t stuck with a piece of hardware that is aging and will eventually require us to migrate.

However, it doesn’t matter how well a hosting company is put together, migrating from one to another is always a painstaking process. Half of the reason for this post is to make sure my site is functioning properly now that it has been moved I have the tough part (database portion) figured out and now its just a matter of rinsing/repeating a few times and we’ll be back to normal. Back to command line land for me!

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