The WindyWeather site is now up on Lunar Pages. After being with Godaddy for several years, the performance began to get slower and slower. It was taking literally minutes to post an article on Wordpress. After an hour with Godaddy support and no satisfaction for why performance was so bad, I looked for other hosting services.

After an hour or so of searching, I found 1And1.com and LunarPages. Both have

1. affordable plans
2. trial periods of at least 30 days.
3. Very reasonable Terms of Use and Terms of Service agreements. You should read these very carefully since I found that some hosting services, such as BlueHost.com, based in Utah, does not permit adult content of any kind. My artistic photos violate their terms of use.

I got a new domain and uploaded my site to 1AND1, however, 1And1.com had two problems:

1. I was not easily able to upload the 34MB Coppermine database. The site is 182K records, and 170K of those are hit statistics which may not seem very important, but looking ahead, it seemed unreasonable to have to break the SQL of the database into chunks smaller than 3MB to get it to upload. The limit was stated as 8MB, but 7MB files and even 4MB files usually failed to restore to the database even tho phpMyAdmin reported success.
2. The MySQL databases have a limit of 100MB, and while my databases do not exceed this presently, it seems more reasonable to limit the MySQL databases on the total space provided rather than a fixed limit.

Lunar Pages provides:

1. SSH [shell account] access so that I could upload the entire SQL for the Coppermine database and do a mysql command in the shell to restore the database. This process completed in a couple of minutes.
2. The MySQL databases come from the total quota for the site, which is a whopping 1.5 TB. My total site size is now a little over 3GB.
3. Blazing speed. Using Pingdom.com and Site24×7.com to time my site showed that Lunar Pages was about 30% faster than 1AND1.com.

I recommend Pingdom.com for testing website speeds. Pingdom provides a detailed breakdown of times for each file of the web page and stores the results from one day to the next so that you can compare speeds of various trials.

A New Wordpress Theme

A couple of years ago I created my wordpress theme from a theme I found and a graphic I found on another site. As I was looking through the wordpress theme site this evening, I found a very nice theme that really grabbed my attention. As you can see it is similar to the one that we had here before.

Old WindyWeather Theme

The windyweather theme has the links on the left and calendar on the right. The articles are down the center.

Nebula Theme

A very striking theme by Gx3. I made some minor changes to the sidebars to change the order of items on the left side and remove the Google search and widget panel from the right side. It now has items in the same place as the Windy theme. I also added the page statistics to the bottom of the page.

Time for a face lift.

enjoy,

windy