Moving web hosts is so long-winded!

For something so logically straightforward, I’ve spent nearly twelve hours switching hosts today.

Serves us right for having a portal, blog and forum I suppose, as each has a different set of complexities.

Actually, I haven’t minded doing it at all. Twelve hours of fun as opposed to hard graft, but I’ve had enough now… need a rest! :D

The easiest to do was the blog. OK it’s pretty simple internally with only a handful of tables in the database, but it’s very well laid out in terms of config. It’s all in one place and easy to update. One tweak and wait for the DNS. No problem.

I couldn’t find an option to close the blog (i.e. put it in some sort of ‘maintenance mode’) which would have been nice, but it’s no biggie in our case.

The Joomla! powered portal isn’t bad either. It bounced right up after some basic fiddling. I actually find it a little sloppy on the coding front in places, though I expect that to have been tidied up in the 1.5 release. It’s not a mature product yet, and it delivers lots of functionality. I’ve played with it enough over the last few months to know my way around it internally now, and it didn’t create any headaches for me so I’m not moaning.

SMF (the forum software) was the hardest to shift across. I love this software to bits, but there are so many directory paths scattered all over the place. Config files and file/directory permissions to change, plus multiple tables which I just hacked manually rather than waiting for the DNS propagation to use the admin panel. So much to test as well!

Still, we’re nearly there now. I’ve just requested the pspell libraries to be compiled onto the new server (they were missing) and we should be good for curtain-up around tomorrow lunchtime.

Thanks for your patience folks; hopefully this upgrade will see us through for another twelve months.

In fact, it was only 11 months ago this week that I first bought the domain name, so the growth of the site has been really pleasing.

Looking forward to helping loads more people soon!

Story link: Moving web hosts is so long-winded!