First Aid Quiz Web Site is now on a hosted server

11 August 2006

Almost a month ago we had a power failure in Coventry and the First Aid Quiz web site was down for about an hour. I made the decision then that I was going to move the First Aid Quiz web site from my home broadband connected server to a hosted server in London. See related blog - Web Site Outage and decision to move to hosted server.

The server is hosted by Compila Hosting. This is the same hosting company that I use for My Linux Tutorials web site www.penguintutor.com. Although I signed up for the hosting shortly after then, it has taken until now to fully move the server over. The web space was made available almost immediately, but it has taken a bit longer for the DNS domain to transfer across.

Although I could have left the DNS with my existing DNS provider, the hosting solution included the DNS costs as part of the package, so I therefore wanted to minimise costs by moving the DNS entry to them.

The server moved over yesterday on the 10th August, but it depends upon what DNS servers cached the entry how soon users moved over. It takes up to 12 hours for all the cached entries to expire. When moving across a few people may have lost their quiz session when they moved over, but to most it should have been completely seamless.

The first aid quiz web site not a particularly bandwidth intensive site, so there probably won't be any noticeable change in performance, although if the site (and my Personal www.watkissonline.co.uk web site, which was on the same home server) continued to grow then there may have been a degradation in performance over the long term, so that has been avoided.

The hosted server is running the Linux Operating System, and uses both Perl and PHP code with a MySQL database. This is similar to the setup I had on my home based machine.

Using a hosting company has obvious cost implications. Adverts are included on the site to try and recover some of these costs.