Dev::Blog

If you think a slow site deters you from reading it, you should see what it does to your desire to update it.

All my WordPress installs on Dreamhost were taking 5 seconds or more to load each page. Combined with some recent database issues (they moved the db without repointing the host names) and a recurring “let’s drop the custom DNS entries” problem, it became clear that it was time to move on.

I’ve actually had a dedicated box for a few months now, but haven’t had the time to do anything with it. The original plan was to start new projects on it and leave things as is on the old server, but now my most used apps are on the new box.

Thanks to a lot of DNS rules, I’m able to keep my mail at Dreamhost (I may move it someday, but migrating mail is the worst part of a transfer) along with some subdomains here and there. All in all, it’s not a bad setup. The biggest part I’ll miss is the snapshots Dreamhost takes every hour/night/week, but some cron jobs will address the backup issues on the new box (yeah yeah, I’ll get to them).

This is exciting! I’ve got all kinds of ideas now with very few limitations, except for, oh yeah, time. Oh well, I’ll get to what I get to when I get to it.

Footnote: interestingly, DH was down again during my migration. Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing downtime redirect pages, guys!

The latest Dreamhost newsletter announced that they’re doing away with CPU usage limits on their shared plans.

It’s about time.

This wasn’t ever an officially posted policy, as far as I can tell (the newsletter says that they never had a set threshold or an admin facility where you can monitor it), but I was seriously stressed out late last year when I started getting daily emails from them reporting that my CPU usage (primarily from VP) was too high, and I needed to either tweak my app or buy a dedicated server.

I didn’t mind the blackmail so much, since I’d been thinking about getting a dedicated box for a while (I’ve since shelved, er, racked the plan), but the funny part came around when I wrote to them for a quote.  It turned out that they didn’t have any available. Their data centre was full.

Shortly after that, I stopped getting emails about CPU, and now the unofficial policy is officially dead.

I’ve been with DH since 2001, and overall they’ve been awesome.  Sometimes you get a hiccup like the one above, but it was really great to see them step up and take care of the problem.

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