After a problematic month where the TechHead site gets taken offline without notice by my hosting provider for consuming between 5-10% of CPU resource it was time to start looking for a new home for TechHead.

In fairness I had probably outgrown the shared hosting platform the site was running on as the site now receives close to 85,000 hits per month and moves over 100GB of traffic.  The issue I had however was with the site getting taken offline without so much as a warning email !

 Looking around I weighed up all the options from hiring a dedicated server, more shared hosting right through to finding colo for my own server.  All had pro’s and con’s though at the end of the day it came down to the financials as hosting or finding colo for your own server can cost serious money which the sponsorship I have on the site unfortunately won’t go anywhere near covering.

Though at the suggestion of Quest Software’s Joe Baguley (@joebaguley) I took at look at Memset’s hosting offerings.  I had heard of Memset before though wasn’t familiar with their hosting packages butafter taking a look I was impressed with their range of hosting solutions.

So, if you are reading this then you have reached TechHead’s new home on a MemSet Miniserver VM Virtual Server!  It now feels quite liberating to have full control of the server from which the site is being run from and most importantly I no longer have to worry about TechHead being taken off line due to using 5-10% of the hosting servers CPU resource.  In fact I now have a pair of Xeon processors to utilise!

Thanks to all my followers and readers on TechHead, I appreciate your feedback and comments – keep them coming and I hope you enjoy the new go-fast, more reliable site. 

This ended up being quite a find for someone like myself who runs their blog on WordPress but has no clue when it comes to PHP.  I wanted to make a couple of minor tweaks to the code of the site and found the information in this basic PHP tutorial by Adam Brown valuable and thought it worth a mention.

So if you, like me, have limited knowledge of PHP and are thinking of having a dabble on your WordPress press site or similar  it’d be well worth checking it out.

I’ve been meaning to do it for weeks and have finally upgraded the Tech Head blog to WordPress v2.5.1.

I thought I’d give this neat little automatic upgrade plug-in called, funnily enough, the ‘WordPress Automatic Upgrade’ plug-in a try.

It claims to be pain free, backs all important files, downloads the latest WordPress release and then installs it.

I made my own manual backup of everything before hand – not that I’m untrusting.  Yeah, right…  But this proved completely unnecessary as it really did what it said on the side of the tin. 

The whole site was backed up and upgraded within 5 minutes. 

Now why can’t all software be this good?