live website creation and promotion

Finally moved all my sites to a new dedicated server, they should be stable now. Server is located at ThePlanet datacenter and performs thousand times better than previous virtual dedicated at GoDaddy (not mentioning other problems with GoDaddy that I got rid of now). Will start adding new features very soon.

I’m having constant problems with MySQL, it is very slow now, especially when there are dozens of search bots parsing my sites.
I also found it very annoying that simple subqueries take a lot of time to execute - it works about 10 times faster after I separate them and use two queries instead of one, passing the data from first to second via PHP script.
It appears to be a well-known problem for MySQL 4.1 - I’m not sure if that’s still happening with 5.0 version - but I don’t have too much time to make thorough tests, so I’m going to move to PostgreSQL, as it seems to be a much better solution. Right now my database code is not too complex (yet), so it won’t take long.
Any comments?

P.S. I understand that this move also means ideology change - things should be done with stored procedures, foreign keys, triggers and so on - so part of business logic is moving to DB. But actually this is exactly how it should be, IMHO.

Update. I’m seriously thinking about IBM’s DB2…

Shared hosting is a good idea for static sites, or for not-so-popular sites, but it’s not my case. After series of problems, where I couldn’t do anything except asking for support from hosting provider and waiting for solution from 15 minutes to 8 hours (each time the interval varied), I decided to upgrade the hosting. Virtual dedicated server offer from GoDaddy was attractable enough (good service + only $35 monthly, instead of $9 for shared hosting). I don’t really need normal dedicated with current server load, and I think I can work with VDS for at least next few months until I need to upgrade again.

So I moved the site. It took me several hours to properly configure the server, apache, php and other stuff. By the way - right now the site is running Apache 2.0, PHP 5.0, MySQL 4.1 versions. Will (probably) post later more details about configuring all this. I also promise to post all details about VDS itself, any arising problems and their solutions.

I almost finished changing site design, prepared for me by Denis Perekhrest, with help from Glen. IMO site has got much better and professional look now. Glen reworked HTML/CSS in such way that programs list (the content itself) moved to the top part of HTML, before tags panel - so it will look better in search engine results now - when search engines rescan the site. Right now Googlebot has scanned about 35k pages, MSNbot - 9k pages.