I have had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the UK for many years now hosting my ecommerce sites, Abc Baby Gifts and Snuggle Feet. When I decided to make more of an effort with my personal site lessharma.com I thought I would move the hosting off my UK VPS and sign up for some good US hosting.
My first port of call was to use a very reliable web hosting company called Wired Tree who I had used in the past. Wired Tree offer great managed VPS hosting and dedicated web servers, they manage your server, back it up, secure it and take care of most updates for you. So I signed up for a new VPS with them at $49.00 per month and moved lessharma.com onto my new US VPS. Because my UK server was on a Cpanel / WHM interface and the new US server was also on Cpanel / WHM importing lessharma.com was done with only a few clicks.
Why move to a US server? Simple, open up the search engine ‘search term’ world to the US market. A dot com domain hosted on a UK server will not show up on a US only web search on Google and other search engines. Eg, Someone in the US searching ‘good wordpress hosting’ on Google, if that person ticks ‘Show US only results’ they would not see my dot com site hosted on a UK IP server. So hosting on a US server opens up the search engine world to the US for my site. Of course the US is so much larger than the UK as a country and more populated.
After a day I had second thoughts on moving my site to a VPS, so I thought I would find a good US host that WordPress would run well on and a host that could take of running the shared server. Back it up and secure it. This would leave move time for me to concentrate on running my blog.
Around this time I was reading Matt Cutts blog (Head of Google spam team) and Seach Engine Land and I stated to wonder who were hosting these very popular sites. So the fastest way to find out was to do a search on Into DNS for both domains, what a surprise both were pointing to the name servers ns1.tigertech.net, ns2.tigertech.biz, ns3.tigertech.org. After a little investigation I found out those name servers belonged to Hosted by Tiger Technologies.
So lessharma.com is now hosted with Hosted by Tiger Technologies and so far so good, support and the speed of the server is excellent, pricing is around $8.95 per month.
Tiger Tech run their own web control panel and not Cpanel / WHM so getting my site over was a bit more work than the move from Cpanel to Cpanel server. I had to back up the PHP databases (one for WordPress and one for my PHPBB forum) via PHP admin and make a local copy of my site files and then upload them via FTP onto my new Tiger Tech hosting account. When I was happy all the files and databases were restored OK with Tiger Tech I logged into my Enom account (domain registar) and updated my name server for lessharma.com to point to the Tiger Tech servers.
So far so good. Tiger Tech also have support literature online to help speed up WordPress with fast CGI and PHP. So if my blog becomes more popular I may try a few of these extra tips.
So if Hosting by Tiger Technologies is good enough for Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land than it’s good enough for www.lessharma.com!
