Moving Xenforo from one VPS to another + optimisation of the new VPS

The Piper

Customer
Hello Matt,

My website is www.pinkfloydfan.net.

I have recently upgraded from vB 3.8 to Xenforo and I am quite happy with the change, it was long due. However, I have been getting a lot of out of memory errors, especially after upgrading from PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.27 to PHP 5.4.28 and MySQL 5.5.36 and also mediocre Google PageSpeed scores, even after some optimisation (73/100 desktop and 65/100 mobile) even though the website has not been very busy for the past year or so (from Xenforo's Who's Online, we usually get from 25-60 concurrent visitors, including 2-7 bots and 0-5 active users).

Current specs are 25GB space, 3000GB bandwidth, 512MB RAM VPS (no idea how many CPUs) with JaguarPC - I've been with them for several years now (since 2007). However, even being a loyal customer, they didn't offer me any discounts to upgrade the VPS or gave me other alternatives to end the out of memory errors, which led me to look for another host. They upgraded PHP, MySQL and tried setting some of the php.ini values to increase memory allocation limits (PHP memory limit from 32M to 128M), as well as removed ClamD, to no avail. And that was it, unfortunately.

So, I am about to order the VPS-2 package at Knowhost, for 60 GB space, 4000 GB bandwidth and, more importantly, 1.5 GB RAM VPS, with 2x priority 8+ CPUs, for a few dollars more than I am paying now, hoping this would solve most of current issues.

Some things are quite important to me right now:
  1. Solving the "out of memory" errors;
  2. Increasing site speed as much as possible, while maintaining reliability (the old VPS basically ran itself, with no maintenance on my part except for vBulletin and add-ons upgrades for many, many years);
  3. Getting rid of any left-over files from vBulletin installations and previous scripts I have used on the website, since 2001 to avoid any vulnerabilities;
  4. Having minimal down-time during/after the server migration.
The reason why I am writing you is to get some advice and ask for a quote of your services:

1) From your experience, do you think the planned upgrade will be enough to avoid those out of memory problems and to increase the server speed? Would you recommend any special requests to KnownHost, such as installation of APC or eAccelerator, for instance?

2) Would you be interested in organising and implementing the server move? I thought that I could perform a clean install of Xenforo on the new server myself, as that is one of the few things I am certain I can do, as I did the whole vBulletin conversion myself, and after that, you'd step in and:

a) Make sure that only the needed files from the current server are moved to the new server (I believe /data, /internal_data and also /library for current installed add-ons);

b) Optimise the new server for maximal reliability and speed;

c) Supervise any sort of needed DNS change (I use GoDaddy) and also implement any redirects that need to be put in place in the old server to redirect all traffic to the new server, avoiding as much as possible any downtime.

Regarding "b", I'm used to running Apache and using mod_rewrite rules (previously with vBSEO and now with Xenforo's SEO features, as well as using rewrite rules for redirection scripts from vB 3.8 to Xenforo). Would you recommend nginx instead of Apache even in that case? Would there be any disadvantages to this change?

Sorry for such a long post, but I'd really appreciate having your honest feedback, and if you could please quote how many hours of work you'd need to get all that done.

Thanks a lot in advance!
 
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