Was an early morning yesterday
I was up before the dawn
And I really have enjoyed my stay
But I must be moving on…— “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp
By time time this entry is posted to the website, all five of the domains I’d been hosting at Inmotion Hosting will have moved on to their new home at Shock Hosting.
If you notice little glitches here and there, please bear with me as I fix the things that went amiss in the move.
Hopefully, the vast majority of people interested in these sites don’t notice anything…DNS quietly updates the name server records to point to the new IP address and the browser or EMAIL client carries on as usual. Unfortunately, DNS propagation can take upwards of 48-72 hours for the millions of DNS servers out there to process the update (though it did seem that most of the big DNS servers updated fairly quickly when I checked it using this tool!).
Just like real moves (such as a PCS that I know so well from my Army brat days), there’s a million and a half things to do when moving web hosting that is rather akin to packing up all of the stuff, loading it onto the moving lorries, getting it to your new home, and then spend the next few weeks unpacking and wondering where the hell everything got off to.
I do plan on documenting the major steps in the move so that a) I’ll actually remember it the next time I have to do this (and I almost certainly will) and b) so that the nerds hosting their own sites may see some things to make their lives easier in their next moves.
All in all, I have to say this is probably the smoothest hosting move I’ve ever had and it wasn’t like the previous one that took me to Inmotion Hosting six years ago whilst on holiday at Ocean Isle Beach which was done very quickly on an emergency basis which was not the most enjoyable way of spending time at the coast.
The server migration tools have definitely improved markedly and honestly, it could have been even easier on me had I let Shock Hosting actually do the move under the covers. Sadly, three of the domains wouldn’t have been able to do a cpanel-to-cpanel migration as they were far too massive in terms of files by orders of magnitude and the other two I was going to handle personally.
There’s still a lot of work ahead where redvixen.com and redvixen-studios.com are completely brand-new implementations (where redvixen.com will be the overarching “corporate” site and redvixen-studios.com will be rebuilt using WordPress and NextGEN as opposed to the Backlight implementation (which I really loved but tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis!) it’s had for quite a while.
Studios has really needed a rebuild for the longest time and it’s a happy bonus to be able to age out tonnes of old content that are well past the sell-by date. 🙂
Speaking of which, this is one of those few web hosting moves where I really wasn’t unhappy with the service and servers I was using before. Ideally, if money were much more readily available, I’d likely have never moved on from Inmotion Hosting as long as they weren’t bought out by the consortium that owns BlueHost and HostGator (I was with BlueHost prior to Inmotion) which started lovely and then got bought by EIG or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week and it didn’t take long for the servers and service to land in the crapper extraordinarily fast!
However, what really prompted this move was that the renewal price really spiked last year when cpanel dramatically upped their licencing costs and that got passed along to me. Last year, I just had to eat that cost as I didn’t think I had time to move all of the websites in the time I had before the renewal kicked in. Had I known it’d only have taken six days to move them all, I’d have moved last year.
The other thing was that the server hosting them was far more powerful than any of these very low visitor volume sites ever needed…by quite a lot. There’s no sense in paying for capacity that they rarely if *EVER* used! They should be happy enough on the reseller shared hosting plan I’ve gotten for about 1/5th of the cost of the renewal I was facing this year.
I’ll admit it’s a bit weird going to shared hosting when I’ve been driving a virtual private server (VPS) for a few years but I think I’m going to like not having to manage the actual server itself. That was another thing…the VPS I was on had an operating system that was approaching end of life quite quickly and the upgrade to the OS looked far more nightmarish than I really wished to take on. The new server is at the latest OS and WHM/cpanel versions and now it’s Shock Hosting’s problem to look after server patches and other system administration that I found somewhat tedious.
So…the servers will be slower than what you had before. However, that will be mitigated somewhat by introducing Litespeed caching on the server side to hopefully dramatically improve how quickly a web page appears in your browser.
Enjoy! 🙂