This post is primarily for Smart Goat web hosting clients, but folks who just want to learn a bit about web servers, hosting, and that sort of thing might find it interesting as well.
(This is not our web server, but it gives you an idea of what one looks like.) Soon, all Smart Goat-hosted sites will be moving to a new web hosting server. Most Smart Goat-owned sites and a couple of our clients have already made the transition. By November 1, all our clients will be moved to the new hosting. We will be in touch with each client individually before moving their site, but this post should help explain a lot of the reasons behind the move and what to expect.
Web Server 101
If you’re not familiar with how web hosting and web servers work, this will be a brief overview. If you already know this stuff or just don’t care, feel free to skip ahead.
A web server is a computer that is connected to the Internet for the purpose of providing access to web pages. Special software (which is also called a web server — we geeks have never been great at naming things) on the computer waits for you to request a web page that it hosts, then sends that web page to your computer.
Any computer can be a web server, but most professional web hosting is done by powerful, specialized computers in a data centers. Data centers provide multiple connections to the Internet, backup power systems, climate controlled environments — it’s like Club Med for computers. One computer can serve hundreds of websites, limited only by the computer’s available resources.
Web hosting providers either own their own servers and data centers, or they rent space from those that do. In our case, we rent a whole bunch of space from one or more hosting providers and divide that space up between our clients.
So Why Are We Changing Web Servers?
For years, we’ve hosted our sites with a couple of different hosting providers. While they’ve done a good job for us, we’ve recently run into some issues we needed to deal with:
- Reliability — Every web server is going to have bad days — days when, for whatever reason, it is slow to respond or completely unavailable. Unfortunately, those days were coming far too frequently with our old hosting companies.
- Service — We kept running into limitations that kept us from providing our clients with the services they needed. For example, one of our old hosting providers has a limit on the number of emails that can be sent in an hour. While this isn’t a problem for most people, it made it very inconvenient for one of our clients to send information to all their members.
- Neighbors — As I mentioned before, one server can host hundreds of websites. In a shared hosting environment, which is what we had been using, you share space with however many other accounts the hosting company decides to put on that server. If your neighbors on that server are spammers or run a high-traffic website, it can cause you problems.
For these and other reasons, we decided to move to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). As far as hosting goes, it falls somewhere between shared hosting and having your own dedicated server. In a VPS environment, one big server is divided up into several smaller servers, each of which gets its own, dedicated resources. That means the other VPS accounts shouldn’t affect yours, and you have complete control over your VPS.
So How’s the Move Going to Work?
Between now and November 1, we’re going to be moving one site at a time to the new server. We will contact each client beforehand to let them know when their scheduled move will be. We will then make a complete backup of your website and copy the files and databases (if any) to the new server. We will also set up any email addresses and mailing lists on the new server at that time. There will be a window of time during which we will ask you not to make any changes to your website. Once everything is in place we will point your domain name (www.example.com) to the new server. When this has been completed successfully we will send you another update.
For most of our clients this will be a simple process and they shouldn’t notice any problems. For others, the process may be more complicated, but we promise to do everything we can to minimize down time. Regardless, you should not lose any emails or data from your site.
Been Putting Off Those Updates?
If there are changes or updates you’ve been wanting to make to your website, this would be a good time to let us know. Send us an email with the changes you need and we will take that into consideration when scheduling the move.
Any Questions?
I hope you found this informative. If you still have questions or concerns please feel free to contact me. We want to make this move as painless and as positive as possible.
