Phew, the past few days have been very hectic and quite stressful… Moving hosting provider has never been a nice scenario for me, especially given how many times I’ve had to do it before, but at least now I’ve moved for the very fucking last time! Since it was such an experience, it needs a full post

Anyway, this whole thing started after Alexia moved from the breaking-every-half-hour-crappy BlueHost to Blacknight. I had always wanted to have my site(s) hosted on an Irish server, but up until recently, it all seemed overpriced in comparison to what I could get on the huge American hosts. Either pay €4 a month for 1GB of space and 10GB of bandwidth, or pay $4.20 a month for 5GB space and 250GB bandwidth? I think the answer is obvious!

Blacknight had always had a special blog hosting package available that would have suited my needs (OK, well maybe not my disk space needs), but the only problem with it was that you could only have a single domain on it, and no sub-domains at all. Given I use stuff.thechrisd.com as my hotlinking domain, it didn’t cut it. Recently though, they re-launched their service with new packages and site and other lark. The new most basic package was roughly the same price (€4.95/month) that was I was currently paying to GoDaddy ($6.99/month), and still came with more than what I’d need: 10GB space, 100GB bandwidth and the usual extras. Not exactly “Minimus”!

Friday

Right, so Friday afternoon, I bought myself a nice little one-year Minimus hosting package from Blacknight Things were looking up as I eventually uploaded my website backup to them, changed the configs, rerouted the domain DNS and everything. The RPWS site looked good, but I couldn’t really say the same for my site… Turns out I had made some changes since my backup from the end of July. A LOT of changes. Which led at first to some 500 errors, then to bigger and worse problems… I was beginning to think that this was going to turn into a hosting hell…

Now before you start thinking that I was all alone with a broken website, I have to commend the support services at Blacknight. There was always a very fast response from the team to my queries, and although I may have whined a bit about something, and I may have been a nuisance, their team always came through to attempt to help out. Seriously, I cannot stress how great their support team is.

Back to Friday, I was getting pressed for time, and couldn’t seem to fix the problems, so I had the DNS changed back to GoDaddy, with plans to re-attempt to transfer sometime next week. Which turned out to be today!

Monday

The first step I wanted to get done was to move the databases to Blacknight and get them setup and running before moving all the files over, so that I wouldn’t lose any Statpress logs, new comments (like what almost happen to one of Reflex’s comments on Friday!), and other things. All seemed to go according to plan, until the database connection errors started…

Onto the support team again just to make sure I wasn’t screwing up with the external options. Blacknight have the handy feature of allowing external hosts to access your databases, so I setup this option specifically for the move. Well, it seems that GoDaddy were having none of that, since the BN MySQL servers were getting no traffic from my GoDaddy site… Epic fail. Hence the few hours earlier where I had a filler page saying “Gimme a few minutes while I sort out databases”. Well, that kinda turned into a few hours…

I sent off a support mail to GoDaddy asking whether they allowed me to access other databases from my server, and whether they could turn it on or not for me. Realising though, that they’d take ages to get back to me, I went ahead and continued with making a new, more up-to-date backup of my site and uploading it to BN. Several hours later and everything is up to BN – and still no response from GoDaddy support!

Finishing Touches

There wasn’t really much else to do after uploading everything. Gallery was giving me a few errors on my site at first, and then was just giving notices, although I do have to blame that on the fact that I had left debug mode on (after the errors on Friday!), but that was soon sorted. Everything else looked fine, and as of now seems to work fine. All in all, today’s move was a LOT smoother than Friday’s!

Overall Opinions

So, based on this move, I’ve changed my mindset regarding a few things:

• Switching to a more local host is MUCH better, even if it may cost more or if you don’t get as good a deal as what you had before (judging by the fact it took only half an hour to upload all my files, while it took 3 hours to download them from GoDaddy!)
• Try not to forget to turn debug mode off…
• DNS can resolve either very fast or very slowly, depending on which you don’t want. When I wanted it to take a while earlier, it happened quickly…
• Remember that your FTP client can hide your .htaccess on you…
• GoDaddy support sucks balls. Seriously big, chocolate salty balls…
• Michele Neylon is one of the best CEOs there is
• The DCU FTP proxy fails miserably when used with my FTP client

So yea, that’s about it. When you read this, try and remember it’s powered by an Irish web hosting company, that perform a lot better than the big, over-the-top American hosting providers.

PS: The RPWS site is still as of now using the GoDaddy services. I still haven’t moved it yet, but then again it’s not the number one priority here!