Well, I've finally done it—I've purchased a VPS and now I'm hosting this blog on it! I'm still using CloudFlare for caching, spam-filtering, and DDoS protection, but now I'm running the blog on a network that is about two orders of magnitude faster than my home upload speed of 180 KB/s. It is VERY nice and the transition went much smoother than I expected!

Basically, to transfer my blog, I installed all the necessary packages on the new server, rolled up all of the important directories from the old server (/etc/wordpress, /usr/share/wordpress, /var/www/wp-uploads, /etc/apache2, etc.) into a few archives, restored them onto the VPS, and transferred the Wordpress database by exporting it as SQL queries. I ran into a few hiccups with the time zone and some Apache misconfigurations, but those were mitigated quickly. For an entire blog migration, 5 hours is a pretty good time—and with minimal downtime, too!

If you were wondering, I got my VPS from BudgetVM. For $7 per month, I got a Xen-based VPS with 768 MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of swap space, 40 GB of Raid 10 storage, and 2500 GB of bandwidth. All-in-all, I think it's a great deal, seeing as I get to have full control over my virtual server for the same price as shared hosting at a site like Bluehost. I did a download speed test on the server and managed to get up to 85 MB/s (yes, megaBYTES). The upload speed from the server maxed out my download connection so I really can't say how fast the upload is other than it's really fast.

I'm actually so impressed with the quality of the service that I'm considering getting a second Xen VPS with more RAM for my Minecraft server. Unfortunately, it would cost me $20/month and I really can't justify the cost right now for what is just a game. I also don't want to charge my friends to use my server because it will take some or all of the fun out of the game. More importantly, it would mean that I wouldn't be able to mess with them in-game. ;)

P.S.: If anyone has or knows of better, cool-looking background and/or header images that I could use for the site under the Creative Commons license, that would be awesome. The theme has been feeling a bit rough on the eyes for a while now.