Blog Migration Complete

It’s done. I now have more control over my online destiny. Today I migrated my domain name, randomconnections.com, to a host that gives me more flexibility and management – Godaddy, of all things.

First, the saga of the blog…

My old web hosting company was Accuwebhosting. It was an absolute pain in the posterior, as for as hosting was concerned. I was severely restricted as to what I could do with databases, and I could only allow uploads to one subdirectory. The first version of this blog was a home-grown ASP application. The blog kept crashing, and the host provider said it was my recursive ASP scripts. Yeah, right.

So, I switched over to WordPress. It was actually cleaner and much easier to use, but my blog still crashed and my hosts still complained. They wanted me to delete some of my content to make the site run more efficiently. Yeah, right.

WordPress kept upgrading their products. When version 2.5 came along I wanted to upgrade so that I could take advantage of some of the security features. My host informed me that I would have to upgrade my platform, which would mean deleting my current database and reconstructing everything from scratch. Yeah, right.

So, several months ago I decided that if I were going to have to back up everything and start from scratch, I might as well do it with a host that let me do what I wanted. That turned out to be GoDaddy.com. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, and most web geeks will laugh at me and say I could do much better. However, despite their misogynist ads and initial misguided support for COPA, GoDaddy is easy to use and their service let me do everything I needed for a price that was OK.

I bought the domain name randomconnections.org and used that to do the migration to the new host. Everything went beautifully, and after a couple of days of downtime, I was online with both the .com and .org domains. Furthermore, I could easily apply new templates, plug-ins, and upgrades without having to FTP everything up to the host. Nice and neat.

But, it seems Accuweb was going to have the last laugh. They still controlled the .com domain. Somehow the renewal reminder wound up in spam, so the company shut me off, despite having this domain for nearly 10 years. It took awhile to get it back online. My e-mail was still with them, and the same thing happened last week with e-mail. Finally I was able to transfer the domain itself to Godaddy, and the migration was complete.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when the transfer took place. I expected up to 48 hours of downtime on this site as DNS servers upgraded. As it turned out, there was no downtime whatsoever. Everything went smoothly. RandomConnections is now completely online and hosted at GoDaddy.com, for better or worse.

GoDaddy’s domain management is very simple, so I was able to do some other neat things with the site. I set up a Google Apps account using the randomconnections.com domain. I’ll now get all of my mail through that GMail account. I can also set up auxiliary Google Sites and Docs to support this site. I’m already working on workshops.randomconnections.com to house handouts, links, and other materials for the various workshops I do. I’m sure I’ll come up with more ideas.

So, the transition is complete, and I’ve got even more tools I can throw at this site. I’m still working out the e-mail, but I think everything will be right as rain very soon. I’m excited about what I can do now, and we’ll see what happens next.