Chicago: Home of the New Rad VPS (Virtual Private Server)

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Welcome to Chicago! .. "the Windy city." If you can read these words, you are resolving to the NEW server.

Chicago - Radified's new homeMy registrar says it's normal for locations to go back and forth between old and new servers for the first 48 hours.

This is Radified's first venture into the world of VPS hosting. We've always used Shared hosting before (way cheaper). VPS is definitely a step up in the web world.

I changed DNS pointers at 2:30 PM (Tuesday afternoon). My registrar is located down in San Diego, so I think the closer you are to San Diego, the faster you'll resolve to the new server. (Not sure if that's how it works, tho.)

The site was backed-up (at OLD server) at 8AM (Tuesday). So any posts made between then and now are lost.

I feel good about the move, having done considerable research, and getting everything I wanted.

••• today's entry continues below •••

As an unexpected surprise, we were first on a new node (the network computer which sits just upstream of our server). We were also first to get CentOS 5 (Linux distro .. those before us got CentOS 4).

We also have all the latest versions of software such as Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (server-side scripting language). One of the cooler things about running our own VPS is that we now have our own name servers:

  • ns1.radified.com
  • ns2.radified.com

.. which makes it much easier to host other web sites (than using the WiredTree's name servers: ns1.wiredtree.com), should we ever decide to go that route.

I was impressed with the level of security that WiredTree uses. You should see some of the passwords they made me create, which contain a mix of lower-case and Capital letters, non-dictionary words, with a sprinkling of numbers and special characters, such as » #RadzvP$=2kewl!

A slider moves from left to right, and changes from red to yellow, and finally to green, as you continue to add more characters to the password. Then they have you change them. One thing I found interesting, in their "Welcoming email," was the following note, listed under heading "Emails from your Server":

If you receive an email about a "Brute Force Warning" it means the security system on your server has detected someone trying to brute force, or guess, log-ins and passwords of users on your server. This happens quite frequently and isn't anything to be overly concerned about.

There are many internet worms and hijacked 'zombie' computers on the Internet which do automated scans and brute force attempts all the time. The email is letting you know that the system has detected such an event and has firewalled off the attacking computer.

The move was not without problems, and I plan to document my experiences, so others who want to upgrade from Shared hosting to VPS will know where the pitfalls lie.

But the big thing I learned is that, even tho much can be done from the control panel (cPanel/WHM) the command line is still where all the *power* lies. That's how the WiredTree sppt techs (Joe & Jake) fixed all my problems .. by using command-line commands.

Radified started out in Kansas City (June 2000, with Communitech). Then we moved to Atlanta (2003? with Interland .. now called Web.com). Most recently to Los Angeles (Feb 2006, with Lunarpages) .. and now to Chicago (WiredTree) to our first VPS.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Rad published on February 20, 2008 11:24 AM.

Moving the Site Today to New VPS Server was the previous entry in this blog.

VPS Upgrade Necessary? Dedicated Server Required? is the next entry in this blog.

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