I use a dedicated host at my day job and really started to rely on things like SSH access and SVN so when working on personal projects it became quite a bummer not having access to these things. Also, a couple of the sites I was developing were becoming increasingly slow to load up (for no apparent reason).

So I decided to check my options…

Now when I last looked at this sort of thing, prices were still rather steep. I remember virtual private servers were going for around £80 a month let alone dedicated ones. Anyway, I was actually quite surprised to see that things have changed.

A number of companies are now selling VPS solutions for around £20 to £50 a month. My requirements did not extend to having masses of disk space and processing power, so I had to look a little harder to find what I was looking for. I basically had two requirements - I had to have complete control of the server environment and I needed unlimited (well… unlimited as unlimited can get) bandwidth.

This led me to two companies - Web Fusion and Easyspace.

The Web Fusion and Easyspace VPS solutions both had what I was looking for, just the specifications and price differed. The Easyspace one was a little bit cheaper and had a few more GB’s of disk space so that’s the one I went for. So far, everything has been surprisingly easy.

It took 48 hours to get everything set up from the time I paid them and after a few support tickets were logged I had access to my VPS. They even upgraded PHP from v4 to v5 for me. I really can’t complain too much about the process, only that the support guys tend to take anywhere between 12 to 24 hours to answer a ticket. Not great but at least they have a live chat facility which gives you around a 4 minute response time. No prizes for guessing how I am going to get support in the future!

Anway, all my sites have been migrated now and I am just waiting for a few more DNS records to propogate then I should be up and running.

Adios Servage! It’s been real…

I guess what prompted me to get my backside into gear was the fact that I have just moved webhosts. There are some neat tricks I have learnt in the process and some great web applications too - not to mention the fact that things weren’t quite plain sailing (when are they ever!?). More on that later though…

So, what is it that I do? I must confess that I am a “Jack of all trades” kind of guy, although there is a twist. I have actually managed to master some of them in my time. I was once a Novell guru back in the day and even had my fair share of Cisco successes, although have left those days well and truly behind me now.

My main interest lies in developing websites at the moment. I use a number of tools but probably the most important one of them all (and you will see many posts about it in the months to come) is a PHP framework called CakePHP. I’ll probably blog about this at some point in the near future so no need to waste space right now.

What do I get up to in my spare time? Ha! What spare time!?