The maintenance is now complete. I hope. I will know for sure when the old hosting account finally expires. Otherwise, I have successfully managed to move my websites to a new hosting platform. I did run into some issues and interesting bits along the way.
For instance, I had named my original hosting account the same as my domain. At the time that was the thing to do. Unfortunately this created a problem when I started trying to move things around. I tried to move this site first as it was the site I had used to test so I thought it would be best to do that. When I did that, my other website that uses/used the same hosting account dropped off the internet. Well, not entirely. It just wouldn’t show up. It mostly had to do with the IP address for the hosting account.
I had to take a step back and reset the hosting account IP information first and then I moved my other site over to the new hosting account. That went pretty smooth for the most part. I ran into one problem and that was with my backup software. I have a lot of pictures in the articles on that site and the content files are getting to be good size, at least for last year and this year. That caused a bandwidth problem for my site when I tried to run the backup and the compression piece. I finally found a backup software that would let me drill down to what was being backed up and that let me create a multipart backup. That sure took some work though. But since that is the site I keep up with most right now, I was glad to have it all up and reasonably stable.
This site was not as cooperative. Once the other site was moved and everything else was uninstalled and the front page for this site moved, I tried changing the IP address again. And it seemed to go ok. And then it didn’t. The IP address would change back to an older one when I pinged it. When this happened the site wouldn’t come up. It took a few calls to tech support at GoDaddy to finally get it resolved. The problem was an A record entry for the domain that was pointing to an address that was an accelerator. Several years ago GoDaddy had this accelerator function that was meant to help the site load faster. They have discontinued that and at least one person I spoke with said they think it was discontinued before they started. I tried to edit or remove the record but I couldn’t. They finally had to get the developers involved to remove that record and things seem to have stablized finally.
I did learn a bunch of stuff, as is usually the case, with this maintenance cycle. I still have some changes I would like to make but don’t have the bandwidth right now to test them and then implement them so they will have to wait.
Thanks for your patience while things were a bit messed up.
