“The RoseBouquet”

YES! I found a new host. Not only that, but I have signed up for a reseller hosting package, which means I can now offer hosting packages myself, set my own prices, and so forth. I want to proceed cautiously with this, because I don’t want any illegal, spamming, gaming, or other nefarious sites on my IP address. Word of mouth may be my best advertising method, but I do hope to sign up enough paying customers to cover my own expenses, and to be able to carry some missions’ sites for free.

I spent most of last week Wednesday and Thursday, and even Friday morning shopping intently for this. I thought I’d found one terrific bargain, but when I tried to reach them, no answer, and when I went checking for what others say about them in forums, I found they were very weak on support. I switched to exploring those with the best reputations for support services.

Finally I decided to go with HostGator. ( HostGator) Their excellent KnowledgeBase in their Support section had already shown me how (after I had set up accounts for each site), I could go back up each at my old host to my computer, then upload and restore in another move from the CPanel of the new ones. The larger sites, of course took a bit longer. Some from 2-4 hours.

By Saturday night it looked like I had done the heavy work. Seven sites moved. I took Sunday off for Father’s Day, but Monday morning I discovered that not everything was working well. One bit of advice in Support said that every username and password should be in lowercase, so I had taken the opportunity to change all of them. However my scripts didn’t all know that. So I deleted most of them, and did that upload and restore thing all over again. As they got done, I went to GoDaddy and changed the DNS addresses. We’re told to allow 48 hours, but by Monday night, all seven sites were showing up on the new host.

Only now I discovered that the emails weren’t working! I spent the better part of yesterday (Tuesday), re-setting passwords for the emails and making sure the settings in my KMail matched. I also went to fix several forms and mailing list scripts.

The biggest problem was that the one site, using the free and popular content-management-system (CMS) called Mambo was not working right. I was getting strange error messages about missing database tables. When I had tried everything I knew to do, I entered a support ticket at Support at HostGator. Time to see how good they really are!

In moments I was getting replies by email. It took a while for them to grasp at what stage I was with my migration, and what my problem was, but by supper time, our exchanges were more specific, and one of them, said he thought he could fix it for me. Over the evening nothing, so he must have gone off shift. But this morning someone else wrote and asked me to ‘create’ a blank database on the site. I did that. So far nothing, but if they can’t fix it, I’ll have to re-install Mambo tonight and feed in the articles and stuff I had already entered over the past year. Time-consuming, but it might be an improvement.

To those who have had emails bounce back this week, when you wrote me, - I’m sorry. They are all fixed again. I confess I’ve ignored most personal emails to focus on this migration. It IS a big deal for my business, an advantage for the sites I look after, and I hope it will mean increased income. My life should return to an almost normal “dull roar” of busyness by tomorrow, I hope.