Foreign Perspectives

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For the first time we find ourselves splitting a blog in two.

The reason is simple really: a while back I started An Age of Magic for a bit of fun and some time later Wendy started writing some pieces on it too. Roll the calendar forward a lot of months and her stuff has ended up swamping mine so we thought that we’d be better splitting the blog in two with stuff she’s written staying in Age of Magic whilst my strand of the blog moves to A Time of Magic.

Taking the posts out of the original blog was easy enough as the Wordpress export facility lets you select by author and the import was easy enough. However, it’s not quite so easy to get rid of the original version of the posts as they were written under the admin user which can’t be deleted so I ended up having to do that in MySQL which means that the post counts still reflect the number of posts which I wrote even though they’re no longer in the old blog. Still, I imagine that’ll sort itself out at some point.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Unfortunately, we’re rapidly becoming experts at this but for those that think they’re locked in to their current hosting service no matter what, think again because you definitely aren’t locked in.

Essentially, it’s fairly simple and has only seven steps:

1. Sign up with a new hosting service. There’s lots (thousands actually) around though, as we’ve found, not all are as reliable as you might think from the reviews.
2. Whilst you’re waiting for your new host to set up the account for you, take the time to begin the process of copying your website from your existing host to your own computer. It’s best to do that even if you’re sure that the copy on your computer is the same as the copy on the host.
3. If you’ve a database driven site, export the database to your own computer. You may need to do this step later if you’re updating the site during the move (eg if you have a blog).
4. Once the new host has given you the login details, copy the site to it’s new location and, if you have them, upload the databases (you’ll probably need to create the databases via the control panel first).
5. At this point you will need to edit the config files of any database applications so that they point to the new location.
6. Change the nameservers to point to your new host.
7. Cancel your old hosting contract. Personally, I’d leave it a few days just to make sure that everything is working.

The big hassle is the time required to download and upload a large site but other than that, it’s pretty painless.

Popularity: 21% [?]

It’s only been two weeks since we moved the websites on the American hosts from Powweb who couldn’t even manage to get the basic hosting account set up first time which says something about the poor quality of their support as they only offer one hosting plan so it should be a click and it’s done type of operation.

Lunarpages managed to get the account set up perfectly first time which isn’t really staggering praise as it’s what they do so they should get it right first time. However, the uptime has been dire for the two weeks. Week one saw the sites being down for around an hour per day so I fired off a support ticket asking my account to be moved to a more reliable server. The response was that they’d rebooted it and sorted out a “few issues” at the same time. It did improve alright but only for a couple of days and now it’s just going from bad to worse with downtime amounting to almost an hour less than half-way through the day.

Anyway, ’tis off once more and I’m in the process of downloading the first site that’s going to be heading for Integra-Net which I’ve heard a lot of really good things about and has the other plus point that they’re under $35/year for the hosting plan that I need.

What’s confusing me is why the hosting services are so unreliable though. With exactly the same site monitoring package in place my UK host is showing downtime of several minutes per week (presumably when they reboot the server) and, no, it’s not a UK based monitoring service.

Popularity: 21% [?]