Now that I am finally nearing the finishing line for this huge change to my website I'd like to update everyone on what's happened and what problems exist.
First off, I now have a new website, jamiebalfour.net. This is only temporary. I will be switching back to jamiebalfour.scot as soon as I can (I'm awaiting transfer on this). All of my subdomains are currently hosted on .net, and whilst this may change, I'm not sure there's much point in worrying about this kind of stuff.
More crucially, since I'm now hosting on a VPS, I've had to learn how to do things without cPanel and the like. Nothing was too difficult. I originally worried about setting up subdomains but they've been painless and easy and I also like doing things this way a lot more.
HTTPS or SSL is also now free since I found a fantastic CA that offers free certificates. I'm limited in space and memory and CPU power, but despite this, I've still found this to be a more performant option.
From One.com to Arvixe
One.com was the second web host I ever came to, the first being 123 Reg but I never took advantage of it as I had no idea what I was doing. When I opened jamiebalfour.co.uk in 2010, I never thought about using it for anything at all apart from sharing my software. In 2012, I decided to ditch the original template and begin a redesign. Still not a web developer myself, I went for a table based design. In early 2013 I decided to build it to do more. I learned both PHP and CSS and made my first dynamic website. In the second part of 2013, I learned JavaScript and responsive design and made my website more flexible and dynamic.
In 2014, I made the change from one.com to arvixe.com. This was a big change for me. It sparked the point when my website had a meaning to me and that I actually was interested in web development for the first time.
As well as this, the plan was to use the new package to do more than just that. I wanted to run Python-based and Ruby-based websites on it too. Alas, this never came and the site was merely the way I managed to expand my website.
Within the first year or so, I experience a huge amount of downtime. Almost half of the first year I was thinking about moving away from Arvixe. Toward the end of 2014 however, I was moved from Seahorse to Ayeaye. It offered 3GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU - a huge improvement. I saw much less downtime and my site was far more responsive. As time went on my demands became bigger and bigger and Arvixe was perfect for this.
Arvixe to A2Hosting
After 3 years of Arvixe to the month, I decided to switch to A2Hosting. This is a huge change that brings lots of new benefits to my website, particularly, as mentioned earlier, VPS hosting. I've been contemplating VPS for about 6 months now as it would allow me to do more than just host a website. It will also give me the flexibility to experiment with other technologies such as Node.js, Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails and much more. I've got less space on this server but I'm not bothered since my whole website and all of its subdomains and my projects comes to less than 4GB.
I've now officially abandoned jamiebalfour.scot on Arvixe and until it moves over, jamiebalfour.scot will be unmaintained. jamiebalfour.co.uk will also be in the same boat until it switches over, which will yet be another 60 odd days since it auto-renewed before I could stop it.
I'm hoping for a very happy time now with my new VPS package and I hope to have my website fully up and running by the end of the next week!
