It has been nearly 9 years I’ve been with Hostgator. Started with their Swamp baby plan and eventually onto a Virtual Private Server just for performance.

But it has become too costly.

RM16000 for 3 years. RM1000 more for cPanel rental for 3 years.

Total is RM17000 for 3 years. That’s RM5666@year. RM16@day.

Hostgator tried to give discount, but discount can give how much wor.

Plus their server is in the USA while most of the visitors on my sites are local.

And so we look for cheaper pastures and finally migrated to…. well, ain’t tell you that now. hahaha

In any case it costs ΒΌ the cost of Hostgator. Yes, new server is a shared server instead of a dedicated VPS.

The main issue would be the migration. The settings. If the new server can run my archaic PHP & jQuery codes.

It took a while for migration. Migrating the not-so-important websites first like the blogs. See if there’s issues.

There were issues while the website was DNS was propagating. I saw on DNS checker every site has already propagated. But the changes I make on the new server wasn’t reflecting. Then I tried from another source my phone using mobile data instead of the wifi. The new server shows up on the phone. But my workstation was still displaying old server content. Frustrated for over an hour, and when I finally turn on the VPN on the workstation, then the new server content was appearing. What a waste of time lolz. I cleared Chrome browser cache, restarted the PC, restarted internet, used incognito, but without the VPN changing the DNS on the workstation, it will show old server content. I could wayt for 48 hours to pass by first before debugging but that means customers can’t place orders till then. Thankfully the DNS resolved within 12 hours, and via the VPN, I could get everything in place before the weekend ends.

There were issues with performance, but client was happy with the savings, so that extra few seconds extra spent on slower processing was worth the money saved.

While migrating I found one site to have over 9GB of data. 8GB was from backup files. Each backup files was 100mb, but over the course of a few years it just accumulated.

There was the SQL migration where the database was too huge to upload to the shared server. Had to do a clean up of the logs that no one cares about anymore.

There was the limit of file size upload. Even though the limit was 50mb, a 20mb file still failed to be uploaded. Solution was to zip the file which makes a 20mb into 1.2mb. Then only unzip in the server and read the text content.

There was root path problems in which since it’s a different server environment, files were not called correctly. Solved with 

define('APP_ROOT', realpath($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]));

I enabled error checking to my own peril and headache. Where any error encountered will halt the page to load. Almost all of the errors were actually due to my lousy coding habits which I have now learned to rectify such as isset(variables) and checking an array before trying to execute them.

To be honest it has been fun migrating. Haven’t had this thrill of programming since my first kid was born about 8 years ago.