I’m glad to say that after a good six months of lying in the dust, I finally managed to salvage this blog last week.
There are a few major changes that have happened. One, I moved the blog from one on my company’s servers, to a new VPS I bought from Prgmr.com. Second, I upgrade to the super awesome WordPress 3.0 engine. Third, This also meant that I now had access to the TwentyTen theme by the wordpress guys.
Prgmr.com is probably one of the best and cheapest VPS hosting that you will find. I found out about them via a blog post comparing Slicehost, Linode, Prgmr, Rackspace and Amazon by the guys who run WasItUp.com. The study is quite intensive and I think Prgmr really came out with flying colors.
I am currently on a VPS with 256MB RAM and runs Ubuntu 10.04. If you pay yearly, it costs just about $6.4 per month! However, wordpress did start behaving a little badly when I moved here and I had to tweak the apache config quite a bit to finally get it to work. I will try to elaborate on that in another post. In case you still have performance issues (slow loading etc), do let me know.
Google too has a part to play in bringing down the performance. A few months back, search.com managed to get hold of my domain somehow. So sudhanshuraheja.com was showing the search.com homepage and google managed to save all of it’s links as those of this blog. So as soon as I took the blog live, GoogleBot crushed it! It took me a decent amount of time to find out what was wrong.
Also, we have migrated a lot of our clients to WordPress 3.0, but I had myself never really used it until now. And I must say that this is quite a bit more advanced than they had about a year back. We haven’t used custom posts here, but the menu is using the cool new feature from WordPress.
I am also using Hyper Cache instead of W3 Total Cache this time. I have heard some good words about it and I really have been trying to use it for quite some time. Also, we’re using the Redirection plugin, as suggested by Labnol.
The main image on the home page was created by Abhinit. You can find some more of his vxt art on our company blog.
PS. I have been having a WordPress vs Drupal discussion with one of my friends, and just to showcase how easy it was to do things in Drupal, he created a website to showcase his point. You can have a look at it here. No custom plugins have been built, and the complete site has used open plugins available in the market. Have a look at it and let me know if you think Drupal is much better than WordPress at making sites like this.
PPS. Changed the caching plugin from Hyper Cache to W3 Super Cache. The CDN support in Super Cache is irreplaceable. Using Rackspace Cloud on this blog now.
I don’t think there is any comparison between WordPress and Drupal because their core focus is very very different. WordPress wants to be a blogging platform for masses and that forces them to keep it really simple; install it in few minutes and start writing. Drupal, on the other hand, is a full-fledged CMS and they don’t shy away from making it somewhat tricky. Most of the time one will need technical support in implementing full Drupal functionality unless one is really ready to invest time and has some knowledge of programming. While WordPress is gradually moving into the direction of becoming a CMS, I really doubt they will ever try to become a Drupal or Vignette.