Web Programming & IT Consultancy
You would think that many of your worries are reduced when you move from shared web hosting to a virtual private server (VPS) but as my experiences testify, there is are some pretty frightening stories out there.
I have dealt with 3 VPS providers in the past year and this post goes through some of my experiences and offers some advice on what to consider when you are weighing up your options.
Not all VPS providers are created equal!
There are lots of examples and tutorials covering Apache and mod_rewrite, but generally they address the problem where you want to map a ‘nice’ url to your script. For example:
http://example.com/products/kitchen/cutlery
to
http://example.com/products.php?category=kitchen&sub-category=cutlery
is easily achieved with the following .htaccess rules:
However if you want to rewrite in the other direction it might not be immediately obvious that you cannot use rewrite rules with your GET URL variables. So if you want to go from
http://example.com/products.php?category=kitchen&sub-category=cutlery
to
http://example.com/products/kitchen/cutlery
you need to sniff the query variables as well as the script name.
Continue reading ‘Using Apache mod_rewrite to redirect old URLs’ »
Moving email servers has always been a royal pain for me. I’ve tried many of them over the years, and migrated from nearly as many of them. However the last couple of times I put myself through the pain I came across imapsync – an excellent script that will do an IMAP to IMAP migration across the wire.
Imapsync uses standard IMAP commands throughout, so is ideal for migrating from one brand of email server to another. (Of course there are still buggy IMAP servers out there, but well behaved ones will work fine.) It will transfer emails, folders, maintain message flags and folder subscriptions.
For best performance use the script on your new server (presumably it is much more powerful that the one you are migrating from) and make sure any obnoxiously large emails, junk, trash and other unwanted mail has been deleted (and expunged) first (see
Debug your IMAP server with Telnet for help with this.
Imapsync is written in Perl and is happy on almost any Operating System (yes even Windows!)