Marketing Technology Blog

Note: Since writing this, we’ve since migrated to WPEngine with a Content Delivery Network powered By MaxCDN, a much faster CDN than Amazon.

The Marketing Technology Blog has been on the same hosting provider for almost a decade now and it seems that the site performance has never improved. Over that period, I’ve done things to slim down the site and even incorporated Amazon S3 services to load the static elements on the site.

Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, I needed to move off the old hosting account and onto a professional one that has opportunities to upgrade and expand resources as the blog needs them.

The site was still extremely slow per Google Webmasters site speed monitoring, though:

Too see how Google is tracking your site speed, register for Google Webmasters and navigate to the Labs section, click on Site Performance.

I’ve been running some other sites on MediaTemple and have been impressed with the robust options they offer. Some of my friends have experienced some performance issues on their hosting, but I’m going to give it a try to see how the site does (so far, so good!).

Moving the blog wasn’t too difficult. There were four basic steps:

1. Move the database – Because of the size of the database, I couldn’t simply upload an exported SQL export, so I loaded up Sequel Pro (10Mb limit and my export file was about 60Mb). I opened the SQL file I exported via PHPMyAdmin and then executed the queries. Sequel Pro does a nice job of showing you progress, by query, so I was able to monitor progress.
2. Move the site files – This was simply copying the files local and then uploading them to the new server. Be sure to also get files that may be hidden, like your .htaccess file.
3. Update the Database Connection – In your wp-config.php file in the root of your WordPress directory, you’ll need to update the credentials to connect to the new database.
4. Update your Domain’s Name Server – MediaTemple offers some very robust domain zone files so I don’t have to manage the information with my registrar (which charges for advanced DNS control). I just updated the name server with my registrar and waited a few hours.

Since I had an established blog, I didn’t use MediaTemple’s 1-click application method for adding WordPress to the account. I thought it would be too much of a pain to add and import the existing database.

I’m still getting some Pingdom alerts from around the globe that the site isn’t fully responding yet, but it appears to be making progress. I’ve upgraded my MediaTemple account to include a SQL container so that the database is also running nicely. Now I have 3 different services loading the site: Amazon loading static images, MediaTemple loading dynamic PHP resources, and the MediaTemple SQL container running the database.

We’ll check the site in a few weeks and see if we’re moving in the right direction!