Today I moved teamtownend.com to a new server hosted with ukhost4u.com. I used them in the past for another project and they were for the most part okay to work with, and excellent value. Previously, I hosted teamtownend.com on my own homemade IIS7 server in our attic. It worked very well, however the myriad other roles the attic server has (file server for our household, print server, Orb server) pushed the little AMD Sempron 2GHz processor and 1GB RAM to the limit at times. Also, our ADSL connection with Be Unlimited has a feeble 1Mb/s maximum upload speed. Things should be a lot quicker now!

The swap went as smoothly as one could have hoped, I exported the MySQL database using phpmyadmin, copied over the files, updated wp-config.php, and away WordPress went. Then I had to manually convert IIS7′s config.ini files to .htaccess since the new server used Apache. Finally, it was just a case of adding the DNS and CNAME records on the new server, before setting the name servers for the domain (to ensure a seamless swap with zero downtime, not that I get enough visitors to really matter, but it was still fun.) The Sempron is sighing with relief now!