Aaaaahhhhh….. That’s the contented sound of me being happy that things are transferred (mostly) to my new web host (www.powweb.com), and things are working. My web presence is pretty minimal, so the headaches were pretty minimal, but headaches there were. But all in all, pretty painless.
I came to the point where I had to dump the old web host (which will go unnamed; email me if you’d like to know who to avoid) because of some ongoing issues with the server my site was hosted on. The biggest issue was that the server is on a couple of blacklists, which makes us guilty by association of being an open relay. So lots of messages that we’ve sent through the domain have ended up in various junk bins across the interwebs. Both domains are still listed on those blacklists, but I’m hoping that this move will help rectify that, plus I’m working with the blacklist operators to get us removed. Ick.
I did a bit of homework on my new host; not enough, mind you, as there were still a couple of unexpected unpleasantries waiting for me in setting up the site. One pleasant surprise is that the neighbors sharing the same server (as reported by a reverse IP lookup) seem to be above the board. There might be others, but time, and more testing, will tell.Powweb is one of the low cost hosts that offers way more disk space and bandwidth than I will ever need; 300GB disk space and 3,000GB per month data transfer, for the low, low price of $5.77 a month (or under $70 a year), for the first year. Subsequent renewals will cost $7.77 a month, but hopefully the price will drop before it’s time to renew.
One of the things they brag about is their home-brew control panel (in place of cPanel or one of the other panels.) It’s ok, but not terribly intuitive. Guess I’m spoiled a little, and have become accustomed to getting things done in cPanel, and I just have to find my way around. Time.
One of the things that was really disappointing with Powweb is how difficult they’ve made it to host multiple sites on one account. They don’t make a big deal of being able to host an unlimited number of domains, but it is mentioned. What isn’t mentioned is that when you add multiple domains, they all point to the same htdocs directory. You can buy the use of a tool — The Domain Redirect — to make it happen, for $7.95 a month. Good grief; it costs more than an entire separate account would cost.But thankfully, there’s more than one way to skin a cat; there are literally thousands of others using Powweb, and many know a lot more about server configuration than me and are willing to share their knowledge. It took about 15 minutes to track down a post in the forums that showed step by step how to sete up the .htaccess file to do what I needed it to do. Sweet! I love geeks!
Another disappointment is that with their InstallCentral auto-installer, you can only install one instance of any of the open source script packages they offer. With the old host you could install WordPress blogs until you ran out of disk space — not sure why you’d want to, but I do know I’d like to have more than just one on the site! I’m sure there is a way to cheat around this limitation; I just need to track down the trail blazer(s) in the forums and pry their secrets from them.
The next hurdle was getting WordPress set up to for davintosh.com and getting the content transferred over. That turned out to be fairly easy as well; export a current xml archive of the content & save to disk, then reimport it on the other end. The biggest hiccup in the process was getting the domain names remapped and pointed to the new server. davintosh.com is registered with Dotster, so I did that first, thinking I could do daveandyvonne.com later. But the way things were configured, davintosh.com ended up being more or less a branch off of daveandyvonne.com, so that needed to be in place before the wp-admin stuff would work. I must’ve installed, uninstalled & reinstalled WordPress ten times trying different things before giving up, updating the registrar for daveandyvonne.com, and just waiting for the new server location to show up. It wasn’t very long; much less time than I remember from the last dns change I made two years ago.
Now the big waiting game is for the domain name registration to transfer. daveandyvonne.com is registered with an outfit in Turkey right now, and is about to expire in a couple of weeks. While it’s not a big hassle to keep it current there, Powweb offers a free domain name with the package, and simpler is better. I’ve started the ball rolling to get the domain name transferred, and I’m waiting with bated breath to see it happen without a hitch. Last time was a bit of a nightmare; please oh please oh please let it go through with no problems!