Well I think I'm just about caught up on my sleep...

Monday and Tuesday were long days.  Let me give you some background.  This story started months ago when I was just about finished with a website I was working on.  I needed a seperate server where I would be able to house the website.  I knew I wanted a seperate server to host this website because this client needed a solution that involved installing custom applications on the server (think email, which is not only custom but is sort of risky to have on a server which other clients use).   I don't host websites out of my basement (anymore) and the cost of collocating a machine or purchasing a dedicated server is fairly prohibitive.  What the heck was I going to do?

Fortunately I spoke with my good friend Marty who listened to my problem and recommended purchasing a virtual private server (VPS).  A VPS vendor uses virtual machine technology, such as VMWare, to slice up a single, physical server into many, virtual servers.  Apparently there a quite a few vendors which rent/sell VPS instances online, provide full desktop access with administrator permissions via terminal services,  and cost less than $30.00 per month.  Perfect!  I did some research and ended up going with a vendor named VPSLand, based out of Atlanta, GA.  They have a good selection of packages at pretty reasonable prices with guaranteed uptime.

The VPS worked out well for my client.  It worked out so well, I decided I could get rid of my existing dedicated server, which hosted my website among others, and move to a fully virtualized environment.  The dedicated server was hosted by Cari.net, which was excellent, but much more pricey compared to virtual servers.

The move from dedicated to virtual needed to occur during night time since these are live websites.  I started the job Monday afternoon and worked continuously until Tuesday morning at 9:00AM.  It went pretty smoothly for the most part but I did hit a couple snags.  I wasn't able to get everything fully configured until about 12 noon.

Fortunately I have this week off from my day job:)  While it's certainly no record for the number of hours worked consecutively, it was definitely a long night for me but I think it will be worth it.  Me and my clients will be looking forward to much smaller hosting bills!

Update 11/25/2008

See the updated entry about moving my websites to different VPS here.