When keeping a blog, it may be a good decision to start it on shared hosting. But as it grows bigger and more popular, and the traffic level increases, shared hosting becomes rather an unstable and insecure solution. That is, using shared hosting means that you share the capacities of the server with hundreds of other websites, that can not only negatively affect the performance of your site, resulting in it becoming less attractive for new visitors, but also, when one of these sites gets hacked, other sites can get under blow too. So, if you want your blog to grow and prosper further, you should consider switching to VPS Netherlands by HostZealot.
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Why would you switch to a VPS?
Let’s have a closer look at the benefits a VPS may give to your website to get a clearer idea, of whether it’s time for you to switch to VPS hosting.
- Increased speed and performance
With VPS you will get much more free space and freedom to host any number of domain names or install any software. In addition to that, you will get root access to your server, which will permit you to change the settings depending on your blog’s needs. Finally, it speeds you up, improving the experience of your customers and, as a result, the popularity of your website.
- Scalability
A VPS provides as well much better scalability so that you will cope with peaks of the website’s activity much more easily, which means more flexibility, stability, and fault tolerance.
- A managed VPS option
If you don’t have enough resources or expertise to take care of your server, you can leave this routine to the hosting company renting a managed (fully-managed) VPS. This will include full installation, setup, updating, and supporting of your VPS, leaving you more time and attention to dedicate to the development of your blog.
- VPS has a self-healing system
An exclusive to VPS (unavailable even for Dedicated Servers) benefit is its self-healing capabilities. Since each VPS is a part of a big VPS node, this will provide that the bad clusters of your VPS will be automatically replaced with the good ones.
These are some key advantages of VPS for your blog. If these are what you need, you’ll discover even more if you finally make up your mind to rent a VPS.
Transferring your blog to VPS
However, renting a VPS is only the first step and the successful migration of your blog to the new capacities relies on you. To help you with this, we’ve prepared the following guide about How to Transfer your Blog to VPS Hosting. Some steps may turn out to be tricky, so, if you don’t feel savvy enough, don’t hesitate to contact HostZealot’s support team.
- Purchasing your VPS
First, you need to choose a hostname for your blog. For this, your domain must be valid. If your domain is “bobsdomain.com”, then your hostname must look something like this “bobserver.bobsdomain.com”.
You can also select some other options when purchasing a VPS – like Control Panel etc.
Upon paying, you’ll receive an email and also a phone call for verification.
- After creating your account
When your account is ready, you’ll receive another email with details and necessary information like root password and login details.
Also, WHM and cPanel will be already preinstalled on your VPS. The first one (Web Host Manager) is the software that allows you to configure everything on your VPS, including cPanel, security, DNS, network, and so on.
cPanel, in turn, is responsible for configuring more individual settings related to the account of your domain.
- Transferring your blog to VPS
Once you have your VPS purchased and WHM with cPanel installed and set up, you can move on to the transferring of your blog from shared hosting to VPS.
First, log in to your shared hosting account, compress all the files of your blog and download them to your computer.
Then, log in cPanel at your VPS and upload the zip file, decompressing it under the “public_html” folder via File Manager.
After it, create a new database and a new user which you should add to the database. Write down the name, the username, and the password of the database.
Find “wp-config.php” file and edit it via “File Manager” in cPanel.
After it, you need to export the WordPress database from the shared hosting. To do this, got to “phpmyAdmin” in cPanel at shared hosting, select the database, and then “export”.
Click go and get the SQL Database on your PC. Then import this database on your VPS.
- Create email accounts on your new host
Use cPanel. Find the “Email Accounts” option and create the emails you need.
- Set up your DNS
For this, go to the portal of your hosting provider. Find the “Add a DNS Zone” option. Enter your domain name and the corresponding IP address.
Then, log into your registrar account and change the DNS settings of the domain you want to move to the new host. These settings need some time, between 10 and 24 to get fully applied.
Congratulations, you have moved your blog to VPS.
Conclusion
Now that you have successfully switched to a VPS for your blog, you will notice the advantages of it rather soon, it will run faster and be generally more stable and secure than before. We hope that this guide was clear and useful and that it has helped you transfer your blog to VPS hosting. If you haven’t purchased a VPS yet, check out HostZealot’s VPS Netherlands. This was all for now. Good luck and see you next time!