Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

Update: We are LIVE! I’ve put a jump on this post as its getting long. Do click on it if you like to see the gory details.

Well it is time for the inevitable. I believe through a few important emails from my concern readers, that even after optimizing my site (as best I know how), there are still issues with connection and load times. I myself have also experiences as much when accessing my site from Sydney. I think if my readers take the time to write me an email addressing this issue, then this is something I cannot ignore. I’m just worried of the readers that decided to stay silent and vote with their feet instead.

Furthermore as my statistics package (on the left) have shown the majority of my visitors are from the West, and it just not logical to have this site located on a server in Singapore. Therefore, after mulling over this for a few months I have decided to take the plunge and move my site over to this host. I think all of you who are web designers and hosting aficionados will probably know who this host is. I think if I would like this blog to move to the next level of reliability and efficiency then this is a long term investment I have to make.

Regardless the next couple of days will be a bumpy one as I have to figure out the new system as well as move the site over. I do encourage you to subscribe to this site through the RSS feed as you still will be able to continue to read the content even if the site is down, which I will expect it to be.

I like to thank all the readers who sent me feedback emails and do stay tuned for better reliability in time to come. Fingers crossed!

Update (02 Sept 07, 2333): Well well, everything you have read about Media Temple’s sucky system stability seems to be true. The first thing that happened after I signed up, was I found my access to the Server Control Panel was very very slow. At the same time I could not access my database with phpMyAdmin. After Skyping the tech support they claimed the slow down was due to the server maintenance, and to wait 2 hours for it to end. Fine.

3 hours later, the system seems to be a little quicker, but it now refuses to allow me to create something as simple as a database and so now I’m totally stuck. While Skyping them the second time, they apolgised and were at a lost as they had no answers to this issue. They can’t even give me a timing for it to be fixed citing a holiday season and are understaffed to handle it. Crap.

But I have to say after everything the tech support people were nice and polite, and I found myself actually not losing my cool during our discussion though I slammed them good, but politely of cause. Let us see how things go, I guess I will give them a 3rd chance. At the very least I still have 29 days to go with my 30 day money back guarantee. Looking at the bright side eh?

Update (03 Sept 07, 1412): Thanks to all who left great comments and advice. I tried this morning and the database creation seems to be working again, so I’ve uploaded the files and now going to populate the database. The problem is they are using some damn ancient version of phpMyadmin that only accepts files up to 2mb, the newer ones take up to 5mb. I’ve got a 3mb mysql file so I’ve not got to go into “Putty” and run SSH server command. Craptastic. I’m a bloody designer for crying out loud not a programmer. Ok *gulp* here goes…

Update (03 Sept 07, 2325): OK people we are LIVE! It took awhile but finally things on the site look fairly stable. I had to let the site go down for a while during the server DNS migration, as it was just too difficult to set the new site up while the original site was still running. Also I had to reinstall the database a couple of times as somehow the conversion corrupted all the quotation marks. Anyways, I will be monitoring the site in the next couple of days and please let me know if you do experience access problems? Once again I like to thank all of you for your kind patience during the move.