Migration
I realized that I needn't continue to pay for the privilege to curse daily.
Welcome to the new and improved doodlemonger.com. You may be wondering why nothing looks different. You may also be wondering what exactly is new, and what exactly is improved. These are valid wonders, and I commend those of you who wondered in precisely that order. For those of you who didn't: don't give up, I'm sure you'll get there at some point. If you never do, I'm sorry for having put you through this bit of wondering at all.
For those still wondering: doodlemonger.com has been moved to a new web host, and therefore to a new and better server. It is faster. It is (thus far) more reliable. It has more administrative options and spam filtration for my email account. It is also cheaper, which is certainly a plus.
I was becoming unwillingly accustomed to the frustrations my old web host (phpwebhosting.com) presented me with daily. My site would be unacceptably slow. On occasion (without provocation and from separate source networks) it would actively refuse connections. The proverbial "last straw" was the inaccessibility of both my web site and email for a period of roughly 8 hours. Bastards.
I realized that I needn't continue to pay for the privilege to curse daily. So, I did some research and switched to HasWeb.com.
The process was relatively straightforward:
- Sign up for the new host
- Backup the entire MySQL database to a text file (sql_dump) from the old host
- Download all non-rebuildable files from the old host (photogallery, primarily)
- Upload all non-rebuildable files to new host (again, photogallery)
- Import all backed up SQL tables and data into new MySQL database on new host
- Install newest version of Movable Type (2.661) on new host
- Test, Test, Test
- Make all necessary configuration changes to Movable Type and photogallery applications to work on the new server (path & database connection changes)
- Rebuild doodlemonger.com using Movable Type
- Test, Test, Test
- Make additional configuration changes as needed to Movable Type templates
- Setup email accounts on new host to mirror current settings
- Test, Test, Test
- Change DNS servers on domain name with my registrar
- Wait for DNS changes to propagate
- Rejoice when everything works beautifully, without downtime in the transfer.
So the hope is that moving forward the site will be more responsive and more reliable than it ever was with phpwebhosting.com. Now that this is done I can focus on telling you all a bit more about the Honeymoon.