CentOS 5 vs 6.4 for Wordpress hosting?

[etherealfocus]

Our company Wordpress site is hosted on a CentOS 5 VPS. I'm ordering a second VPS for testing purposes, but the new one will be running CentOS 6.4 by default. I wouldn't imagine that'd be a problem since it'll just be running Apache and PHP, but figured I'd check and make sure - the different versions shouldn't screw up my testing, should they?

Also, any best practices advice on testing beyond the obvious 'try a feature on the test server; if it works then migrate it'?

 

[TSDible]

It isn't ideal, but so long as you keep the same versions/settings for your Apache, *SQL, and PHP, everything should be fine.

 

[smakme7757]

I can't see why it would be a problem. You should always use the latest version of Apache, PHP and MySQL and Wordpress unless you have a reason not to do so. So unless there is something wrong with an older version of Wordpress a theme or your content which doesn't work well with newer versions of PHP then you should just be able to export and import the blog to the new VPS

Just be sure to correct permissions and you should be good to go. Permissions are usually what breaks Wordpress blogs when moving to new hardware.

I presume this is something you can test before it goes live, so i doubt you will run into any major problems. And if you do you will be in a position to fix them 🙂.

 

[Scarpozzi]

There's not much difference between Cent 5 and Cent 6 for what you're doing. The default filesystem in Cent 6 is EXT4 instead of EXT3. The kernel in 6 is newer...but Cent 6 has been out over a year, so most of the bugs should be worked out.

A few tricks...Backup the old server to tape....first off. Then, if you have VMware available, you can make a Virtual Machine copy of your old server....or make an image that can be turned into a VM if you need to go back to it.

Install a Cent6 LAMP server and configure wordpress on new hardware or a new VM....record the version numbers, do an in-place upgrade on the old server.....then migrate the DB and filesystem data from old to new once you get the versions equal.

That's probably all overkill...but it's one way to cover all bases and if you ever need to restore from the old server, you'll have 2 copies of the data before you started... (tape backup and virtual machine)