Business Hosting and Beyond - Website Migration
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008If there is one thing I have learned from doing this business thing all these years, it is to work with the best companies out there. The problem is, they are kind of a pain in the tush to find. You are bound to get involved with the wrong companies here and there. I sure did.
Today was another day spent transferring two of my websites over to my new hosting company. By the way, this is called website migration. It’s not the most difficult thing in the world to do, but it can take some time if the site is large. At this point in my life, I am very good at it.
I woke up this morning and decided to optimize a few databases that were left on one particular server of mine. One database was rather large…I mean huge. It was a little over 750MB. That’s pretty big. When I began my process, the page hung…the database was too big. This, in turn, took the MySQL server off line. I called support at the wickedly horrible web hosting company (the one I have been moving away from) and couldn’t get through, twice. Then, I called a third time and got through to the Philippines. I swear I have nothing again the Philippines, but I vow to never knowingly do business with a company who uses them for customer support. They are all very nice people. The issue lies with the company not giving these customer support people any authority to do anything on their own. If they are just going to be working the telephone and passing the issues through to the real support department, why not just use the real support department to start off with? I have a real feeling many of these companies are actually losing money by outsourcing their support. That support is enough to drive even the most regular person nuts.
This morning, when the server (yes, the entire server) went down and I finally got through, I explained the problem. I told the girl to reboot the machine. She continued to troubleshoot by reading off her little card. I tried to tell her again just to reboot the machine, when she put me on hold. I waited for about ten minutes when I realized that the same scenario from a few months ago was actually happening again. I decided to hang up the phone and just transfer the sites over to the real hosting company. That, my friend, was the best investment I have ever made. It saved my sanity and saved my hair.
Well, the transfer process is almost complete. The DNS of both sites still has to resolve, but things are looking up. One of the only issues left to deal with is the data loss. I was forced to use my own database backups…one from January 2 and one from December 16. So, if you placed any ads on any of my websites in the past two weeks, please re-register and replace your ads. My apologies.
Here is one word of wisdom for you if you are in this line of business - no matter how much your website hosting company tells you they do backups, backup your databases and files yourself to your own computer. The last time this happened with this company, I was informed that they had no database backup. Nope, they just didn’t and I suppose I would have to travel to the Philippines to argue about it.
