Welcome to Drupal 7. I've moved my blog from Dreamhost to Rimuhosting and have gone VPS! In addition to that, my site is no longer sitting on MySQL (I had no choice while I was with dreamhost!) but now uses PostgreSQL 8.3 with Drupal 7. The fruits of my labour in all its glory.

But not without its issues along the way. There are some things you should know before you consider deploying a Drupal 7 site.

1) Beware the version of PHP

Drupal 7 is cutting edge, it uses a lot of new concepts introduced into PHP5.2. The problem is, stable operating systems like Debian lenny are cautious to use newer versions of PHP.
Yes, Lenny does come with PHP5.2 by default but PHP5.2.6 in particular. For reasons unknown to me, that was an issue. When I tried to run Drupal 7, it would die in a Segmentation Fault. The solution was to upgrade my PHP version to something more compatible. Unfortunately, Lenny backports didn't help me out, I had to go with a non-debian standard. dotdeb.

Dotdeb

Dotdeb turns out to be really good actually! It offers the latest stable version of PHP to the latest stable of debian! Follow the instructions here to be able to install PHP5.2.14 or greater.

Once I had installed a higher version of PHP, things started to work.

2) Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL

Maybe I should do a more in depth post about this but I will quickly cover it here. There are many ways out there to convert MySQL databases to PostgreSQL databases (not many in the opposite direction). However, each one takes time to handle and additional work to sort out things like foreign keys and constraints etc. However, when it comes to Drupal, there is a better way to do this because Drupal knows the database schema you want to install and with Drupal 7, it can structure SQL specific for your database!

Drupal 7 made converting from MySQL to PostgreSQL, really, really easy. All I had to do was install the schema foreach enabled module then go over each table all select everyting from mysql and insert it into PostgreSQL! that simple. Oh, with the additional fix to update PostgreSQL sequences.

So my old blog is still accessible via http://geek.joshwaihi.com just in case anything unexpected happens, Drupal 7 is still in alpha. If you do find anything unusual, please let me know :)