With all the accounting stuff out the way, I’m able to focus on more productive issues, like moving to a new web server.
As anyone who’s moved a website before will know, this can be a perilous exercise, and an order of magnitude more risky if your site contains anything other than straightforward HTML with images.
WorldTV is currently hosted on a Virtual Private Server. A VPS is a relatively recent option for people looking to host websites, as it neatly fills the gap between high end dedicated servers and low end shared hosting.
A VPS is basically a dedicated server split between a small number of customers, say 4 or 8. Shared hosting on the other hand can mean you are sharing your server with literally dozens of other customers. The other key difference is that with a VPS, clever software makes your server appear as if you have your own dedicated server. You can install all your own key software packages, including staples like Apache (for serving web pages), PHP (the popular web application language), Perl, etc. You can’t do this with regular shared hosting, you have to rely on the software they install for you.
In terms of cost, a decent shared hosting package costs around $20 per month, a VPS around $75 per month, and a dedicated server around $150 per month. It’s easy to see why VPS servers are popular for mid sized websites…
With WorldTV gearing up for its full launch, our current VPS package is no longer a serious option. It’s time to make the move to a dedicated server, and with a hosting company that can handle scaling to multiple dedicated servers.
As a bootstrapping startup without a Chief Technology Officer, I’m having to fill the role of CTO myself. The question I’m considering is whether to do this particular move myself, or have our outside development partner do it. The new dedicated server is set up and ready to go (by our hosting company), all I need to do it would seem is move the site over to the new server, something I’ve done in the past, albeit slowly and with much hair pulling.
On the one hand, delegating this to experts would free up a week of my time and probably a fair bit of stress. But on the other, only I really know all the details of how the current server is put together, and it could be more trouble than its worth to try to explain it to someone.
It’s a tricky question!
(I did end up doing it myself and was happy to have been able to do a ‘cleansing’ of all the unused files – ed)