W-Shadow.com

If you can read this and see this post on the site (not just in the RSS feed), then the site has been moved okay and DNS propagation has finished. It seems nothing important was lost in the process, aside from a days worth of network stats and possibly an email or two.

Some random notes :

• w-shadow.com is now hosted on ServInt. They have almost universally good reviews everywhere I’ve looked, and the price seemed acceptable considering the feature set/server parameters.
• Domain transfer between registrars and DNS propagation took the most time. As for moving the actual data, it only took a few hours, even taking into account the mysterious issues with backups on my previous hosting provider.
• I don’t see as much speed-up as I would have expected from moving from shared hosting to a VPS. WordPress page generation is only about two or three times faster (a rough estimate). It may be that WP itself is pretty slow, but there are plenty of other possibilities, too, like the 34 plugins I have active.
• The OpenID IDP server I have installed is suddenly broken, for no apparent reason. I can log in directly, but authorization always fails on third-party sites.I still haven’t found how to fix it.
• “Load average”? What is load average? This page has a very detailed explanation (maybe too detailed).

Overall, I’d say moving to a new server isn’t too hard. The biggest problem is finding out what you need to do. Actually doing it is easy enough. In the case of ServInt, I found a helpful guide (unfortunately the forum is for SI customers only).