Moving Our Sites To a New Server
As Possibilities subscribers know, we recently signed up
with a new hosting company, Site5. [NOTE: We no longer recommend Site5. Use our "Contact" link to find out who we decided to host with.]
All of our domains, except willmaster.com, have been moved.
This article contains notes about what we did and, in one
instance, what would have been done differently.
Right now, let me say that we're impressed with Site5. Quite
so. If, after reading this article, you decide to host with
them, please use our /hosting affiliate
link when you are ready to sign up. (Currently, they give
you a free month of hosting if you sign up using the
Firefox browser.)
I don't know how they can charge such low rates and still
provide the features and support that they do. But it is
the actuality.
And we found out they are good people, too, not just a good
company.
The hosting plan we acquired does not allow reselling
(although they do have reselling plans available). A domain
Mari created and has been maintaining for the owners, and
that we hosted for them on our previous hosting account, is
the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation donations coordination
web site http://friendsofpineridgereservation.org/
The domain is not ours. But we don't charge for hosting it.
So it's a gray area of the rules.
Site5 management decided with us and is allowing us to host
the domain. Really nice people.
The site moved with ours to the new hosting account.
During the move of our sites, I kept telling myself, "Okay,
don't mess this up. You're supposed to be a genius-type
programmer dude."
Well, I did mess it up. But just once, without far-reaching
consequences. (So I guess I'm an almost-genius-type. There
were 10 sites, and I messed up with one, so that would be
90% genius and 10%, well, the opposite of genius — if my
calculations are correct :-)
The Bontrager Content Management Software (BCMS), currently
in beta, not yet for sale, really made things easy. It was
also the reason for the one mess-up. Most of our sites are
now on BCMS.
Moving the sites entailed moving the files, ensuring scripts
had correct permissions, and changing the DNS in the domain
record. Then test everything when the new DNS information
propagates to our ISP.
The BCMS software had a lack, I found out. As it currently
stands, the server directory path to where public web pages
are generated is not changeable via the control panel. The
configuration database had to be changed manually. (That
will be corrected for the public release, you can be sure.)
We have a cron scheduled script run every morning that
launches the BCMS software on our various web sites and
updates web pages, blogs, indexes, and RSS feeds with any
new content we may have scheduled for it.
And that's where I made my mistake.
I forgot to change the BCMS configuration database for one
of our sites. And when cron ran the script, BCMS dutifully
tried to create the web pages, but couldn't do the job
completely because some of the directories were incorrect.
The content was built. But the masthead and navigation
links on all the web pages were missing.
There was so much going on at the time that I didn't notice
the snafu until the day after. The fact that cron would
launch BCMS for that site completely slipped my mind.
But http://affinityseries.com/ is a relatively new site,
with less than 200 page views per day. At least I didn't
make the mistake on some of our more heavily used sites!
Only one more site to go, willmaster.com. It's the largest
of all, housing the Valued Customer Club, the Master Series
CGI programs, this Possibilities ezine, and other aspects
of what makes our Internet software business go 'round.
If anything untoward happens, I'll mention it in the
willmaster.com blog.
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Will Bontrager
©2005 Bontrager Connection, LLC
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