I have not had much fun, from about end of October until week before Christmas. My previous host decided to “upgrade” me and not only lost random files while transferring to a new system, their new mySQL DB decided to also not allow me to save large blog posts. Of course, they claim nothing is wrong, and of course they cannot see what is wrong because they have a super fast connect with all their servers. But for us poor slobs out here….well I can’t get them to do anything to fix this.
Early December I finally decided enough was enough. I found a new hosting provider based on the recommendations of friends. I spent a week installing to MT 4, upgrading from MT 3 which I had been using for years now. I also tried WordPress and thanks to my friends who are big fans of WordPress who volunteered to help me with the transfer. But I was also using MT as a primitive CMS, which WordPress just was not flexible to do. Even though they had nicer themes and some other really nice functions, I decided to go back to MT.
I’m thankful for my buddies at Sixapart who helped me with some sticky issues, like the fact that my old filenames were created in one way, but the new MT 4 created them in a different way. This was pretty critical; who knows who was linking to me from the outside? Also, I use bit.ly a lot and all those links would have also been broken. And most critical, my SEO juice could have been harmed because Google would have discovered a whole bunch of links that would be broken and who knows how my SEO ranking would have been affected.
I spent the better part of this week getting my URLs to match up and, thanks again to the support folks at Sixapart, I was able to get the URLs mostly translated over. I then packaged up everything on my old hosts and FTP-ed them over. I also exported my blog entries from my old MT 3 and then re-imported them all into MT 4. Somehow this all went off without a hitch.
The next step was to then redesign my blog. That took a while getting to know the CSS and HTML of MT 4 which was different than MT 3. I didn’t have much time to work on this, so I cranked out something that I could live with for now.
In the middle of all this, I was fiddling with domains and messing around with where they pointed to. Of course I screwed this up many times. But thankfully I figured out exactly what they should be set to and now everything should be working fine.
By the way, I HIGHLY recommend NOT hosting your domains with your site hosting provider. It makes changes that much easier when you’re trying to bail on a hosting provider when you don’t also have to transfer domains to somewhere else. Yes it may be cheaper, but man it just made my transition away from my old hosting provider that much more lengthy while I waited for those domains to transfer to somewhere else.
It was really disappointing dealing with my old hosting provider. I was with them for so long and they failed me in the end. It was also obvious they weren’t doing much to improve things, because the control panel at my new hosting provider was so much more flexible and advanced. Then I got caught in IT support hell where I would say I have a problem, and they could never seem to figure out what the problem was on their end. Now let’s see if they actually stop billing my credit card….!
It was an interesting exercise to move hosts. I don’t relish the idea of ever doing this again, and can only hope that my hosting provider doesn’t screw up miserably, forcing me to move yet again.