Storebuilder Blog - Site Related

On Tuesday I took the plunge and ordered a new server so that I can customise it for joomla applications.

I've been running on a rackspace server for the past five years and whilst their service is very good, unless you are a bona fide linux administrator there are plenty of negatives associated with running a a managed server.

For a start it's down to you to make sure that the OS is up to date. In my case I'm running a version of Red Hat that's reaching it's end of life in October and won't be supported anymore so it makes sense to ditch it rather than upgrade the old technology.

There's also the very real possibility that you can bend the server by knowing too much and attempting something beyond your skill level, like trying to amend permissions on a directory and mistakenly applying them across the whole server. Ooops!

So I've opted for a fully managed service which will allow me to concentrate on the affiliate marketing and not worry about the high level tech stuff. I just tell support what needs to be compiled and installed and they do it. Simple.

For example the Global news module that I'm using on this site requires PHP Tidy to be installed on the server. So that's now been done and any common libraries like imagemagick are already setup so it's going to speed up the development cycle by a big margin.

In a couple of months I'll be offering hosting packages to those who want to set up a joomla site and need some hand holding so watch this space for that.

I used Akeeba backup to move the site across to the new server and it works brilliantly. The only problem I had was that there wasn't enough allocated space on the old server for the backup file to be created and so I had to clear some stuff away to make room.

If you've been running your joomla site close to the maximum disk space allowed then this could cause you a major problem. You'd have to upgrade your disk space allowance first to be able to create the backup file and then move your site.

There is a problem with the forum which is next to be figured out but as it hasn't got going yet it's no biggie and I'll take a look tomorrow.

Looking ahead, development can become much quicker by building a joomla skeleton with all of the required components and modules preinstalled, pretty much like a turnkey CMS solution.

The Adwords PPC project is on hold whilst I move all the stuff over to the new server but in the long run it means everything can happen much quicker so it will be worth the wait!

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