Ok – I ran into an odd issue while migrating my entire smartergeek.com site over to MediaTemple hosting – running WordPress and Thesis.
Why did I move my site? I ran into a performance issue with GoDaddy’s hosting of WordPress and mySQL. My page times were taking between 3-49 seconds!.That’s crazy even for shared servers. There are lots of posts about it with no good resolution – so I decided to test MT hosting.
*If you want to see how many sites are running on your shared server – then enter your domain name here.
So far – so good. Page times under 1 second.
Disclaimer: I am a Super Reseller for Godaddy and continue to have all domains registered there along with several hundred customer websites.
Before anyone comments about it, yes I did all the usual such as disabling all plugins, new mySQL database, etc. Turns out that the static HTML pages and even MS Access databases run fine. It’s something to do with GoDaddy’s mySQL implementation.
One of the issues I ran into was with the popular wp-dbmanager plugin. I use this plugin to automatically backup my database and store it on my webserver and email a copy which is archived in my Google mail. Remember, Rule #1.
Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public
To correct this issue, move the .htaccess file from wp-content/plugins/wp-dbmanager to /domains/smartergeek.com/html/wp-content/backup-db
This issue had a lot of discussion as well. Took me a bit to figure it out. Of course I had properly moved the .htaccess file and checked the CHMOD through my FTP. Turns out MT has a weird issue where the GS (grid service) accounts may have the file mappings changed periodically.
Anyway, in my case, I clicked into the Database…Backup and got a warning about the pathway – but the warning advised me to change the pathway, which I promptly did. Problem solved.
Oh yeah – I also had to change it in the Settings…Miscellaneous for the media path. I got a “Is its parent directory writable by the server?’ error. Problem #2 solved.
Now – if I can get back to productive work.