It’s going to take a while to cut-over, but I just flipped the switch on moving this blog from being hosted on pair.com, to being hosted on webfaction.  This comes after spending a bunch of my weekend one December trying to optimize things on my old host.

I already see a big performance improvement. Webfaction’s server finishes processing a page in about the same amount of time as pair’s server spends just loading up WordPress. Most of this is down to the fact that webfaction uses eaccelerator, a PHP opcode cache so that it doesn’t have to spend as much time parsing the wordpress code on every view.

Webfaction also has their webserver set up to automatically compress responses so they download quicker. I’d gotten this going on Pair, but it required some plugins for dynamic pages and some rewrite rules and scripts to serve precompressed javascript and stylesheets. The new arrangement is simpler. There are fewer things to break and fewer steps required when I install an update.

Pair has been really reliable for what is closing in on a decade. We’ll see how Webfaction does, but they have a good reputation, and they did well with a little experimental site I tried a year ago.

I’m going to see how this goes for a few days, if there are no red flags, I’ll move our other blogs over. Then I have to figure out what to do with Pair, they just automatically renewed my service for another year at the beginning of the month.