New Web Host
A couple of days ago on a message board I read, a friend asked for web host recommendations. Two other friends responded with high marks for Dreamhost. I haven’t been terribly thrilled with the performance offered by my previous host, so I’ve been considering a move for some time but never took the time to research a new one. With a recommendation that I could trust, now seemed like as good a time as any.
The move has been reasonably smooth, and I’m impressed with how much control I have over my account. There has also been a noticeable increase in performance. However there has been one strange DNS issue that I haven’t been able to resolve just yet. Adding “www” in in front of my domain still points to the old host. I may be the only the only one that sees this problem, though. If I SSH in to either the old or new host and ping the “www” URL, it resolves to the new host in either case. No amount of rebooting or DNS flushing locally has fixed it so it is probably my ISPs DNS cache that hasn’t fully caught up with the new info.
Fortunately, I’ve been able to work around this by configuring Wordpress to use the domain name without “www” on both the old and new sites. Wordpress will rewrite the URL if the “www” is added so you should always get to the proper site. This is only a temporary solution, however, because it requires that I maintain the site on both hosts.
I have also taken this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, which was just released yesterday. It was a very painless process, as most upgrades have been in the past. There should be no noticeable difference in the look or operation of the site as the biggest changes seem to be in the admin interface, but I haven’t yet had a chance to look into all the new features.
Update: 48 hours later, it would seem that my ISP’s DNS has finally caught up with the rest of the world.
