Migration post-mortem

It’s been a busy and productive week for the site.

Site Migration

After several months of intermittent poor uptime, I migrated csanyk.com to a new host. Since this site first went online in 2010, I had been hosted by a friend who generously provided me with free hosting, which was great when I was just starting out and not sure what I wanted to do with the site. The site started going down frequently a few months ago, and according to the hosting administrator the problems had to do with an aging database server that had various issues. I tried to be patient and waited for the database server to migrate to newer hardware, but even after that was done we still had problems, evidently due to another shared domain that had been compromised and was taking up too many resources on the server, resulting in downtime.

This took way longer than I had wanted to resolve. I had made a decision to migrate to a new hosting provider after the second occurrence of csanyk.com being down for an entire day, but it took a while to shop around. I eventually just went with the company that I went with for DNS registration, mainly because I figured that would make it more convenient to only have to deal with one vendor, and because across the board it didn’t seem like there was a dramatic cost difference between the other hosting providers that I looked at. Once I had settled on them, I purchased a hosting package, but then it took over a month for me to get around to doing the actual migration. It seemed like every time I had a free evening to work on the migration, that was a day that the old host would go down again. I finally got the files from the old site moved over to the new host, and cut over DNS on 1/5.

I spent most of the next week testing and troubleshooting the live site in production, which resulted in some instability as I made changes to the site, breaking it on occasion. But as of 1/9, all issues arising out of the migration had been fixed and many improvements have been made to the site (most of which aren’t obvious).

  • 1/5/2014
    • csanyk.com served from new host.
    • csanyk.com wordpress site moved from /rants to domain root.
  • 1/6-1/9/2014 url
    • https
    • redirects, fixed broken links
    • database cleanup and optimization
    • Reviewed, cleaned up active plugins
    • SEO
    • Security review and hardening
    • Performance improvements (caching, compressing, minifying).
  • 1/13/2014
    • changed wp theme from “Twenty Thirteen” to “Able”

The benefits you’ll see from this are:

  • Better uptime/stability
  • Faster pageloads
  • No more broken links anywhere!

I’ve already seen a significant improvement in site traffic.

csanyk.com traffic

Before the host migration, I was seeing anywhere from 100-140 views on a typical day. Post-migration, traffic has been around 200 views/day. I think the reasons for the traffic increase can be attributed to a few causes: Ludum Dare 28, reduced downtime, and the improvements in pageload time, fixing broken links, and SEO. The difference was so immediate that I wonder if even on a “normal” day on the old host if I wasn’t seeing microbursts of downtime or slow server response that were depressing my traffic figures.

I liked the Twenty Thirteen theme, as default themes go it’s the best one I’ve seen so far, but its column width is a bit too narrow for my needs. I didn’t want to try to customize it, because the less I have to maintain with the site, the more time I have to put into game projects. The Able theme’s main article space is a bit wider, which will allow for better presentation of program code snippets, and larger images and videos.

I’m currently looking for ways to improve the way I display program code, so that it can be formatted nicely. So there are some further improvements still to come.

More to come

Later this year, I plan to re-do the site downloads section to better integrate it with wordpress, and set up e-commerce.

I’m looking forward to switching from working on the web site to working on game projects.

Updated: 2014-Aug-17 — 4:59 am

Leave a Reply