[plug] hosting

[Patrick Coleman]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Gregory
Orange<gregory.orange at rpsmetocean.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I posted here a while back about a web shop, and got quite helpful
> responses, thanks all. Now that we've settled upon Magento as a platform and
> are paying someone to build the actual site, we're thinking about hosting
> space. For the short term we'll use the people who are building the site
> because that allows time for it to get settled and working properly, and
> will be easy access for them to fix any problems.
>
> After a few months, we'd like to at least consider other hosting, to make
> sure we're getting a reasonable deal. So, my question - can you give me an
> idea of hosting providers that are worth their salt, and how much we should
> expect to pay to host a web shop. The business is for-profit, but hardly any
> (and no income for the owners) - maybe in time it will grow. I don't know
> where it should be hosted, but all of the customers are in Western
> Australia, perhaps one day there will be other Australian customers.

I'll take this opportunity to plug my company, Labyrinth Data
(http://ld.net.au) :)

It sounds like we could host your site on one of our shell plans, for
$11/month; we alternatively do virtual private servers starting at
$29/month. We currently offer a first-month-free promo to SAGE-AU
members, and we can probably do the same for PLUG members.

> If we do change hosting, I imagine migration will be a cinch? Dump the MySQL
> database, tar up the entire htdocs (or whatever) dir; move over to the new
> environment; change DNS, and all's peachy... right? Some down time I
> suppose, so that would have to be publicised.

What you can do is take a dump of the database and tar up the site,
but leave the old site running (possibly in a read-only mode). Then
get the new site running, and change the DNS to point there. As the
DNS propagates (you can speed this up by reducing the TTL to eg. 10
minutes before you start) customers will seamlessly move to the new
site without downtime.

Obviously any database changes to the old site after you dump the
database won't be carried across; this may or may not be an issue for
you.

-Patrick



-- 
http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au - WA Backup, Web and VPS Hosting