Why move and why VPS?

I had considerable problems with uptime during the month of December. Even when my traffic wasn’t particularly high, my site was going down. When I’d submit a trouble ticket, my hosting company at the time would inform me that it was my sites bringing down the server. They suggested I move to a more robust and more expensive VPS solution.

Now I’m not going to bash my former host, they were generally good. But when things would break, they would continue to break for several days or weeks. Finding a true fix didn’t seem to be their strong suit. I wasn’t particularly satisfied with their responses to this situation so I also decided to find a new host.

I set about on a search for a new host, and did some Googling. But I found Twitter to be a valuable resource. After posting the question about hosting providers I received a number of responses that helped me narrow down my search to a couple providers.

I ultimately chose LiquidWeb for 3 primary reasons:

1. They offered a managed VPS solution. I’m not a server admin and didn’t want the responsibility for maintaining my server. That would be a recipe for disaster.
2. Their support came highly recommended. This was evidenced when I first went to their site and a chat dialogue opened where I could talk with a sales rep about my needs and they could help me in my decision.
3. They are a Michigan company. I’m based in Michigan, and our state has had a rough go of it lately. Being able to support a local company was definitely a factor for me.

Preparing to Move – Get Your New Service

The timing was fortuitous. If I’m making structural changes to my sites, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is definitely preferable. I’m off work, and so our many other people. So I have time, and not many people are coming to my sites anyways. When stuff goes wrong, I can respond quickly and not as many people notice.

Step one is to sign up for your new service. You’ll need a destination for everything. Things here will probably vary based on the host you choose. In my case I specified a main domain at the time of sign up. Once my server was set up, I then needed to create my other domains on the server. This includes creating the domain, and typically creating accounts for email addresses, FTP access, and SSH access.

Ideally, you don’t have to make DNS changes at this point and you can access your new server via the IP address they provide.

Collect Your Old Stuff

There are two main components to a Wordpress blog, the wordpress installation itself (these are all the files on the server) and the MySQL database. I’ve found the quickest way to ready everything to move was via shell access.

I had never accessed the shell prior to this. You want to be careful because you can really break stuff, but we’re just going to use a few commands that will really make the process go quickly.

If you don’t have it already, get PuTTY which is a program you can use to access your shell. Once you have it downloaded and installed, start it up. For the host  you’ll enter the server where your stuff is (this is the old server). If you’re self hosted (and if you’re not this whole article doesn’t really apply), you should know this from FTP’ing in the past. If you’re unsure contact your host for instructions on how to log in to SSH.

Once you’re logged in, the first thing to do is to navigate to the directory where your blog is. This is command line stuff, like DOS, but don’t be scared. To see where you are initially just type in

ls

That will list the contents of the directory where you are. To move into a subfolder just use (and replace DIRNAME with the folder you want):

cd DIRNAME

Once you’re at your Wordpress installation, we’ll get a dump of the MySQL database. To do this, you’ll need to know the database name, the server, the username, and password. If you don’t remember this information, it is all in your wp-config.php file. To get the dump, enter the following, replacing the capitalized items with the appropriate terms (FILENAME can be whatever you want, just remember it) :

mysqldump –u USERNAME –p DATABASENAME > FILENAME.sql

You should now have a SQL file containing your database. To make sure it’s there you can use the ls command and it should be listed.

Next we want to compress all your blog stuff, and your SQL file into one file so it is easier to transfer. We’ll do this in SSH also. Assuming you’re in the correct directory, this will put everything into a file called blog.tar.gz

tar cvzf blog.tar.gz  *

Again, you can check to make sure the file is there using the ls command. If it is, you’re ready to transfer things over.

Making the Move

At your new host you’ll need to create a database. This can usually be done through the control panel. In addition to creating the database, you’ll also need to create a database user account and a password. In the case of cPanel, which is pretty common, here is a tutorial.

Now it’s time to access your new host via SSH. You’ll want to do this with the IP instead of the domain name if possible. For the account information you should have already set this up.

Once you’re in, the first thing to do is to get to the directory where you want your blog installation to go. This may be something like public_html if it goes at the root, or you may need to create a sub folder like /blog.

Assuming you’re in the right spot, we’ll transfer in the blog.tar.gz file we created earlier. To do this use the following command:

ftp OLDSERVER.com

You’ll then be prompted to log in to your old account. Upon successful login use the command:

get blog.tar.gz

It will transfer the file to your new server. You can type exit to leave the ftp prompt.

Next unzip the file using:

tar xvzf blog.tar.gz

You can check and see if everything came over by using the ls command.

The next step is to import your sql file you created earlier, into the database you just created. It’s another one line command:

mysql DATABASENAME –h DATABASEHOST –u USERNAME –p PASSWORD < FILENAME.sql

If everything worked, you should have a duplicate of your blog on your new server. If you can access the site via IP, you can test things out.

Make the DNS Change

If you’re confident (or semi-confident) everything is set up correctly, you can go to your domain registrar and change the nameservers to those provided by your new host. Within 2 days everybody typing in your domain should be getting your new site. Then you’re done. Woo Hoo!

Gotchas

Those are the steps I followed, but I did encounter a few hiccups.

1. File permissions I ran into problems with the wp-cache plugin, as well as the file uploader because the wp-content folder wasn’t writable. One way to fix this is to change the permissions to 777 which means anyone can write to it. This is not the preferred method because it causes security problems – in that you become very vulnerable. What my host did to fix this was to install the suPHP module. This solved the problem. I won’t get into the details, but it has to do with file ownership.
2. .htaccess For some reason the .htaccess file didn’t get included in the compressed file for the directory. So my permalinks went away and quite frankly wouldn’t work. I just copied over the .htaccess file separately.
3. DNS lag During the DNS move, I found myself not knowing if I was on the old or new site and it seemed to change. A quick check is to open up a command line on your site and type in ping hostname.com The results that come back show the IP so you know if you’re accessing the old or new site.

There are a number of new features in 2.7, including an overhauled admin panel and enhanced comment functionality (threading and pagination). But the the feature I’m most excited about is auto-upgrading. When that next new security release rolls out, no longer do you have to go through all the steps mentioned above. You can now upgrade from within your administration panel.

This same functionality allows you to browse and install plugins without having to download and FTP the files to your server.

So if you haven’t jumped to 2.7 yet, I encourage you to do so. It was one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve made (and I’ve been using Wordpress since 1.5). I didn’t even bother to disable plugins first and I had no issues. Proceed with your own caution on this front and please check the compatibility list before doing so.

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If you’re looking at your site you won’t notice it, but if you look at your stats you may notice a dip in referral traffic. The hack redirects visitors to your site coming from Yahoo and Google to a site called anyresults.net.

Not being a techie I can’t fully explain what is going on, but somehow the hacker gets access to upload a file and register it as a plug-in. Fixing it is a pain, and there may be other solutions, but here is what I did:

1. Look in the wp_options table for the record with active-plugins. If you look at the list of active plugins you’ll see a number of familiar names as well as other characters. But there will also be an image file (jpeg, png) that has a name similar to an image somewhere on your site. That file isn’t actually an image, but a file with a bunch of garbage in it. Note the name and location of the file.
2. Using your FTP client find the malicious file and delete it.
3. Going back into MySQL check the users table. I noticed that in each instance there was another user created that doesn’t show up when you go in through your blogs control panel. Delete the record for that user.
4. Reinstall Wordpress. And don’t just do an overwrite, but delete all the files and reload them.
5. Change your passwords.

This doesn’t seem to discriminate as to the version of Wordpress you’re using. I was already at the latest, 2.5.1, and still got hit. I also doubt that these changes will persist so you may have to go through the exercise again – at least until Wordpress offers a security update.

The wordpress support thread can be found here.

Table of contents for What works for me

1. What works for me – Part 1: the basic tools
2. What works for me: Wordpress Plugins

My favorite thing about Wordpress is the vast array of add-on functionality that is available. If you were wishing that Wordpress had a feature or function, chances are someone has already developed it. The following are the plug-ins that I lean on heavily on my various sites:

Essentials

• Akismet: I find this to be probably the single most important plugin I’ive ever installed. On my Tigers site alone it has saved me from having to moderate over 300,000 comments
• Wordpress Database Backup: Another essential tool. You can set it to backup your database at regular intervals and have the backups emailed to you, or stored on the server. With this plugin there is no excuse for losing more than a week’s worth of posts should something happen.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Want Google to know about all of your pages? Want Google to know how often you are updating those pages? Just install this plugin and it will generate a sitemap that is recognizable by Google and will even ping Google to let them know when you’ve made an update.
• WP-ContactForm: Readers have to be able to get in touch with you right? There are several Contact Form plugins available. Just make sure you use one of them.

Accessibility

• Wordpress Mobile Edition: Have you looked at your site on a mobile device? Did you let the whole thing load or did you get discouraged? This plug-in adapts your existing site and puts it into a mobile browser friendly theme. It’s so easy I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.
• Full Text Feed: If you’re not a full feed kinda blogger this probably doesn’t apply. In later editions of Wordpress the feed truncates if you use the more tag. This will prevent that from happening delivering the full post in the feed.
• Chunk Urls: Don’t you hate it when someone leaves a link as a comment, but it is several hundred characters long and breaks your theme? This plug-in will cut those links down to size keeping your site pretty.
• Share This Deportes: Make it easy for others to evangelize those great posts. Share This was originally developed by Alex King and provided icons for many popular bookmarking/social sites as well as the ability to email posts. The deportes version is tailored to sports blogs with links to sites like BallHype and Yardbarker.
• Smart Archives: Many blogs are shying away from displaying date based archives. However I think that for sports blogs they are still worthwhile because many readers may want to search for information by season. But if you’ve been blogging for a while this can get unwieldy. This plugin neatly arranges those archives into a more manageable format. Here it is in action.

Stickiness

• Get Recent Comments: Make it easy for your regular readers to see when new comments have been left, so they know where to leave comments of their own.
• Articles: I use this plugin to create a “Best of” page. Just mark those popular articles with a custom tag, and they’ll display on a page of your choosing.
• Related Posts: Keep people on your site longer by pointing them to other articles they may care about.

This wasn’t an exhaustive list of all the plugins that I use, just the ones I consider most important. One that wasn’t mentioned in the list was In Series which can link a series of posts together. It’s what is driving this series in fact. Are there plugins that you use or recommend?

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Table of contents for What works for me

1. What works for me – Part 1: the basic tools
2. What works for me: Wordpress Plugins

This is the first post in a series that will look at various elements of blogging, and what I’ve found to work for me. This is hardly a comprehensive list about blogging, or a best of the best list. It’s simply stuff that I’ve tried, that I’ve had success with. It may not work for everyone, and there may (and in many cases are) probably better options or solutions. But hopefully this will prime some discussion and I look forward to feedback and letting others know what works for you.

The Blogging Platform

Wordpress is my tool of choice. I started on Blogger and it served me well for a very long time. But 2 years ago I got to the point where I needed functionality that just wasn’t available in Blogger. Blogger has since added quite a bit of that functionality, like categories for example. But because of the hundreds of plug-ins available with Wordpress, I don’t think Blogger can ever really catch-up at this point.

Now with Wordpress there are two options, a hosted version called Wordpress.com and a version you host yourself. There are advantages to the hosted version. The big 2 as I see it are:

1. It’s free. It costs nothing. No hosting costs are required. No domain needs to be registered. It’s completely free and not a bad route to go if you’re unsure of how committed you are to this blogging thing.
2. You don’t have to know anything about programming, or maintaining a web site. It’s all taken care of for you. The software is updated automatically as new versions come out. It’s all handled for you which definitely has an appeal in terms of time, and expertise.

Still, I use the .org version. I want control over everything, including access to all the great plug-ins that exist. I also want control over back-ups and control over my content into perpetuity.

Now mind you, I’m not a web expert. I have some programming experience, but none of it is with PHP – the language that Wordpress is coded in. And even with that limited knowledge I’m able to get by.

As for the cost, that is really pretty minimal because there is lots of cheap hosting out there.

Hosting

I currently use Dreamhost (aff link) and have been very satisfied for the last year and a half. There is more bandwidth and storage than I’d ever need, plus I can host multiple domains and subdomains. And most importantly the price is rights. I pay $100 a year and there are numerous codes to get you discounts. For example, typing in BBCHEAP will result in $50 off your order.

I’ve had pretty good success with uptime and customer support and only experienced one extended downtime. There have been some rare, short 1-2 hour hiccups but those are more a nuisance than anything else.

A nice feature of Dreamhost is the ability to 1 click install a number of software packages, including Wordpress. And if you use the 1 click install option to set up your initially, you can take advantage of it for upgrading your blog as well. This further reduces your need to know anything about running a website and allows you more time to focus on writing.

Prior to Dreamhost I used Cornerhost. Cornerhost was a much smaller company, and I enjoyed the individual attention and being able to IM with the owner of the company when I needed help. However, with the small size of the company (basically 1 guy) it led to some very extended downtimes with very little communication.

Domain Registrar

There’s some value in having your own domain name from the start of your blog. It’s easier for people to remember the name, and a name without a blogspot or wordpress in the address can help give the blog an identity of its own. Not to mention there’s some SEO juice from a domain name that contains the same words your site is about.

I’ll admit it, I was a sucker for the Super Bowl commercials and use GoDaddy. I don’t really know how much differentiation there is with registrars, but I’ve been happy with Godaddy. The interface is easy to use, and the prices are competitive.

Feed management

I love Feedburner and use the service to manage all my feeds. What I love the most is that it provides stats on how many subscribers you have, and what feed readers they use. There are also stats to show you which items are clicked through most frequently.

It also incorporates email subscriptions giving some of your less tech savy readers an option.

Other features make it easy to change the appearance of your feed and add feed flares such as the ability for people to email posts or see how many comments have been left on a post.

Blog editor

While I often use the built in editor in Wordpress, sometimes I get tired of toggling between various windows as I write a post. So I also use Scribefire extensively. Scribefire is an add-on for Firefox that splits your browser window in half. You can drag text from websites in to the editor, and be looking at the various pages while you write. It’s a great, and most importantly free, tool that enhances my blogging productivity.

So these are the foundation elements for me when it comes to blogging. I’d love to know what others use to set up the foundation for their blogs. The next article in the series will look be Wordpress specific with a listing of the plug-ins I love.

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The biggest issue was probably that the transition seemed to break the “tables” I made using pre tags.  It didn’t seem to handle the the line breaks with in the tags well – or at all.  The result is that the the line breaks aren’t observed and it overflows the area.  Depending on the browser, this can either screw up the template, or just look really bad.

Fixing it also proves difficult using the WYSIWYG editor which tries to help too much.  I’ve found it best to turn off the editor when correcting these problems.  This can be done from the Users menu with a check box at the bottom.

The tough thing is finding all the effected posts.  If you’re comfortable with MySQL you could query the database to find all posts with the PRE tag.  It still requires a manual fix, but at least you know which posts to target.

I’ve also worked my way back to add categories.  Any posts I’ve been fixing I’ve been adding categories to.  Also, I’ve looked forward those popular posts (like interviews) and made sure that those were categorized as well.  Now I won’t categorize all 1000 posts, but I did do about 100 of them.

As for performance (visits, page views, revenue), it was tough to judge the impact because of strange traffic levels due to the holidays.  It’s something I’ll probably address in a month or so.

I was going to post the things that I noticed immediately, but someone else already reached the same conclusions.

The first step I took was to setup a subdomain to install Wordpress to. I didn’t want to be working in the same directory as my live site. If you’re using Blogspot to host your blog, you wouldn’t need this step. You would however need to secure web hosting in the first place. After setting up the subdomain, and installing Wordpress it was time to configure Blogger. This involved changing the template (backing up the old one first of course), and changing publishing and date formatting options. Once the options were configured correctly, I published the blog to my new subdomain (test.detroittigersweblog.com). Immediately after the publish was complete I restored Blogger to my original settings. This isn’t completely necessary, it was just my own paranoia about forgetting what my previous settings were.

Fortunately, it appears that in 2.0 the import script handles the Blogger configuration for you. I haven’t tried it yet, but it appears that you simply provide Wordpress with your Blogger login information and it does the rest.

Once the blog was published to the subdomain it was time to tweak the import script. If you aren’t a programmer, I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s hard to say whether or not you’ll feel comfortable editing the script or what the results will be. I’m not a programmer, but I do have some programming experience. While I can’t write PHP, I was able to at least discern what the script was doing.

I didn’t run into any problems with editing the script, or performing the import. Where things got interesting was getting everything working afterwards.

First, my dotcomment import wasn’t very successful. What happened was that any comments that had an apostrophe didn’t get imported. This proved to be pretty easily correctable. I simply edited the script to remove the part where the posts were written into the database. I then added a single line of code to the comment importing script called addslashes that handles special characters like apostrophes.

With the comments imported, I checked to make sure that the website functioned, and that older links still worked. While the website functioned, the old permalinks didn’t work. Because I was using dotcomments in the past my pages all had a .php extension. The script I’d used to preserve permalinks had been written to accomodate .html extensions. As a result, all my post names included .php (or posttitle.php). Now I’m not sure why this worked, but I found that by changing posttitle.php to posttitlephp all my old links worked, as well as the newly created internal links. Fortunately I was able to just run an update query on the MySQL database to make the changes across all posts.

Now I hope I haven’t turned you off to migrating. There were some technical hurdles to overcome, but mine was a somewhat unique case where I had to combine a couple of workarounds. If you have been using Bloggers native comments, the process will probably be much smoother for you. The same is probably true for Haloscan comments. Also, if you have a newer blog with only a few backlinks, the permalink issue probably isn’t as important. At the same time, I wanted to highlight that it might not be a smooth transition and there might be things to overcome. Even with my problems, it only took me about 5 hours to do everything. And that includes virtually no knowledge of PHP, but some knowledge of working with databases.

I know many sports bloggers started off using Blogger. Many are still using it. Some have probably considered switching platforms, while for others it may have never crossed their minds. I’m going to do a two part post about my migration from Blogger to Wordpress. The first part (this one) will focus on my reasons for switching. Many of the reasons aren’t specific to Wordpress, and many of the same principles apply to a variety of blogging software. Wordpress just happens to be the one I picked. Part two will cover the steps I took to do it, and will be more specific to Wordpress.

Republishing Hell
One of the biggest fundamental differences between Blogger and many other solutions is static versus dynamic pages. Blogger uses static pages. To achieve this they republish pages whenever you post or change your template. Many other services use dynamic pages, where they typically use a programming language (like PHP) to query a database (typically MySQL) to generate the page when it is requested.

In my case I had nearly 1000 pages of content. Every tweak to the template, like changing links in the sidebar or changing Chitika keywords, resulted in the republishing of every one of those pages. For me this meant making all changes off hours. If I tried to republish while the east coast was awake, it would frequently timeout in the process. With dynamicaly created Wordpress pages, all I do is save changes to the template. There is no republishing because the next person to request a page will see the changes.

I don’t know if this was the biggest reason for me switching, but it was definitely the one that pushed me over.

Navigation
This is one area where I’ve always felt that Blogger was very limited. I wanted my readers to be able to find what they wanted easier, and more importantly find things they didn’t even know they wanted. From a revenue standpoint, the more pages readers are looking at, the better your chances of ad clicks. Also, if first time readers stumble upon a wealth of information, they stand a good chance to be returning visitors (or subscribers).

While Blogger offers the ability to show the 10 most recent posts, that is about it. With Wordpress users can see the preceding and following posts. There are plug-ins to show related posts. The search capability is excellent without having to use another service.

The biggest difference in terms of navigation though is probably category functionality. Blogger doesn’t allow for categories, while almost every other package does (including Wordpress). Now whether or not I’ll go back and categorize all my previous posts is doubtful. However, I will make a point to categorize my post popular posts, and I will be categorizing going forward.

Comments
When I started on blogging, Blogger didn’t offer comment functionality. I implemented Dotcomments in 2003. I was happy with dotcomments, except for the fact that the comments existed in pop-ups. I wanted them to be integrated on the page. Blogger later implemented comments, but there was no way to import all the existing comments. Plus, I hated Blogger’s implementation of comments which takes you to a different page to input the comments.

After some searching, I found that someone had written a script to allow for the import of dotcomments. This meant I could retain all the work my readers had put in, and get the type of implementation that I was looking for. Hopefully the results will be a stronger community, and improved search engine results with more content on the page.

Revenue
There have been occasions where I would have loved to integrate Adsense or Chitika ads into specific posts. Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow for javascript inside a post. Essentially you are limited to hardcoding the ads into the template. On the other hand, there are plug-ins that make it easy to include ads within posts.

Control & Ownership
While Blogger publishes all of your pages, it controls your posts in it’s database. The advantage is that you aren’t responsible for backing up that database, plus you have a copy of your posts on static pages. The disadvantage is that you don’t have any control over your data. While I don’t really see Blogger going anywhere – especially with Google behind it – there were no guarantees. By moving the data to a database at my webhost, I gain more control. While the methods probably differ slightly, I can easily export an entire database containing several blogs in a matter of a couple clicks. The trick is actually doing it.

While there were a number of compelling reasons to switch, something had kept me from doing it. First of all, Blogger didn’t inhibit my ability to post content. The result was that I was a little lazy. Also, I was nervous about maintaining all my posts, permalinks, and content in the transition. I have recently achieved a pretty good SERP spot (#3 for detroit tigers), and didn’t want to risk compromising that by having a bunch of broken incoming links – or losing posts altogether.

But as I mentioned earlier, publishing had become so cumbersome I had to make a switch. Now the timing of the switch may seem curious, essentially on the eve of a new version being released. My thought was that I wanted to do the import while the various scripts that had been written still worked. I knew they worked with version 1.5.x, but I didn’t know if they would with version 2.0. As I’ve since learned, I probably would have been better off waiting because the new version is supposed to have improved importing. In any case, the technical steps will be covered in part 2 of this case study.

• Importing from Other Blogging Platforms:  This is of particular interest to me considering I just converted my Tiger site (more on this in the coming days) to Wordpress from Blogger.
• Built In Caching:  Essentially, once somebody has requested a page, a cache of the page is stored on the server.  This will make subsequent requests for the page load faster.
• Spam Handling:  The new version will come with Akismet spam filtering installed.

This site is powered by Wordpress, and I plan to upgrade this week.  I’ll be sure to let you know how it went.