Back In Business

A few days ago I realised I had a problem. A blog post I had just written kept replacing my content with an iframe. With a bit of help it looked like the server I was using had been hacked. This made me rethink the choice of host as I wasn't all that happy with them even before that. It also had another side effect of making me rethink the software i chose to use for this site.

When I was thinking about what I wanted this site to be, a little voice in my mind kept whispering "Drupal" but I decided that since the majority of the content will be a blog, that WordPress would suit better. As good as WordPress is, I've never quite felt at home in it. So, since I was changing hosts anyway, I decided to revert back to my initial instincts and switch to Drupal. My issues were with a poor choice of host, not WordPress.

Over the last couple of days have been manually adding blog posts by copying and pasting, and reformatting where needed to fit the Drupal theme. I've paid careful attention to keeping the published dates and times as they were before. I have not re-edited the posts to reflect Drupal, so there will be plenty of references to WordPress, it's themes and plugins. There is more work to be done with the theme, and modules for various functions, but for now, the site is functioning fine. I also had to wait for the nameservers to update to be able to start working on this site. As I had a grand total of 6 comments including 2 pingbacks and 1 reply from me over 35 posts, I didn't see any great priority in bringing them across too.

Whether it's the new host's server administration and policies, a (CentOS 64bit server) or Drupal, or a combination of all three, it feels much snappier now. I've always regarded CentOS, FreeBSD and Debian as ideal server platforms in regards to security, stability and reliability so it was a no brainer to switch to it.

It must be noted that I switched from one free host to another, so the adage of "you get wat you pay for" comes into play. With a free host, your options are limited, your bandwidth is a lower priority etc. This is to be expected. Having said that however, my initial impressions are of night and day.

My previous host seemed to offer the earth in terms of various unlimited items, which seems appealing on the surface but in reality means they're overselling the capacity to the point where everyone on the server suffers. I believe it was a Linux server, but in hindsight, was probably not configured or secured very well. Error pages like 403's would bring up adverts from their partners, some parts of the day the site would be incredibly slow to access and sometimes time out altogether etc As good as Linux is, a poor quality admin and a policy of overselling will always undermine the benefits of Linux.

My new host has many more restrictions in place in the free account, but they feel like a proper host because of it, with limited email accounts, limited MySQL databastes etc. There are limits on the commands a user can execute on the server too, as it should be. This initially gave me a problem when trying to install Drupal when I found a command Drupal needed to perform during the install was forbidden to me. I don't trust automatic installers like Fantastico provided by hosts to install an application properly, as I've seen plenty of issues on support forums caused by these. I always prefer to download the software, FTP it up to the server and manually install it.

In this case my new host uses an installer called Installatron which I reluctantly had to use to install Drupal. Often you're reliant on a good server admin doing a good configuration, and keeping the latest version of the software available to install. I have to tip my hat to both my host and Installatron as this went flawlessly. Not only that but it offered me the latest version of Drupal too. I have no idea how well it handles other software, my focus was exclusively on Drupal.

At this point you may be wondering why I am not mentioning the names of my previous or new host. I am waiting for a little while to see how the site performs before I endorse them. Suffice to say that my initial impressions are very favourable. It is of course easy to find my new hosts from a whois request.