For those of you that follow my blog regularly know by now I moved hosting a few times in the last 2 years. Each move has been spurred by the ever changing requirements every developer is facing. The first move was related to finances, as our US partner could no longer continue maintaining the Windows Server he had graciously sponsored for me. I moved to a local South African host however they did not support ASP.Net MVC and I moved my hosting to ReliableSite. This was not a bad move, however I recently started working on the new Eskhaleni website and also started optimizing our sites. I was somewhat surprised to find that ReliableSite did not support compression of sites and thus the search for a new provider started.

I sent out a tweet, after a few hours of scouring Google brought me no closer to finding an affordable VPS host. Considering the 7 to 1 exchange rate this was an important factor in making the move. I decided to go the VPS route since it seemed the most logical next step, as mentioned by CodingHorror when he moved his site to a shared VPS with Phil Haack. In true twitter fashion I gained a few followers, one of which was SwitchLink. I placed the order for a 512MB, 25GB HDD VPS running Windows Server 2008 after confirming that it can run SQL Server 2008. Unfortunately after two days of trying I could not get SQL loaded, and they soon confirmed it was a problem with the VPS platform and the Windows Image. The search therefore started again.

Somehow I happened to hit the right search criteria and came across a slightly more expensive offer at UltimaHosts.  The first reason the offer appealed to me was the use of Hyper-V as the hosting platform for the VPS. Secondly they had a special offer to do a lifetime upgrade to a 1024MB, 80GB VPS with the first month’s hosting at 50% discount. I was extremely impressed with their service from the moment of placing the order to finalising the additional IP addresses I required for the hosting. I was also impressed with the loading of Windows Server 2008 R2 as the main operating system. Another reason I was able to do the move was the saving brought on by moving my DSL ISP to Afrihost who are currently running a special with bandwidth at ZAR 25.00 per GB. This proved a significant enough saving to afford the monthly payment for the new VPS.

As of now all the domains I host, including HoneyB.co.za and Eskhaleni is hosted on the new VPS. The whole move along with the configuration of the server took less then 12 hours along with the additional flexibility to develop my websites in the technology I prefer. Let the new era begin.