There has been half a reason for the absence of articles of late, a change in hosting providers! I appreciate, that’s lousy and actually you’re not interested, nor did you probably even notice I’d been gone – but what the heck, I’m back

For years, probably 6, I’ve been with PowWeb who were OK, but as renewal time came around – I was starting to think twice about paying the 2 years up front, when I could limit the period down a little bit. With the credit crunch and all this recession lark – it seemed a logical idea to control my cash flow. So I took a day off work, did a bunch of research and eventually concluded that GoDaddy’s Grid hosting, currently in beta, looked like a good alternative. So I prepared for the move.

I’ve never moved a website before without the support of people who know DNS way better than I do, so this was going to be a bumpy ride. However, making sure that I did as much as I could, I dumped the database, got a zipped up backup of the filesystem and did an extract straight from WordPress and prepared for the inevitable feeling of foreboding.

Things were messy when I realised that to move a domain name, it has to have been at the current provider for more than 60 days. I think when my hosting ran out it was about 55 days. I’m not sure why, nor am I altogether worried by it – but my email stayed working for almost all that five day period, though my website (unpaid) continued for maybe a day (probably due to it expiring on a Sunday). I thought about re-pointing my name-servers for Amadiere.com to GoDaddy’s, but the FAQs weren’t as helpful as they might be – so I gave up pretty promptish and decided I’d have a period of deadness.

The period of inactivity proved useful, as the hosting package I chose included IIS7, PHP5, ASP.NET 3.5, MySQL and MSSQL – so stuff to play around with while I waited. Eventually, everything went well and my site was up and running with my email being down for about 2-3 hours (all said and done, a minor miracle actually). I had a pickle with the Name-Servers on the way, but a quick call to GoDaddy tech support (which I expected to be tosh – but were actually fab, helpful and friendly), that was quickly resolved.

So the move went perfectly?… not quite.

GoDaddy’s hosting isn’t perfect for my liking. You have access only to your webroot, not a folder directly up from your webroot. When I tried to create blog.amadiere.com, this meant I had to create a directory within my webroot for the blog too – something that wasn’t the case at PowWeb. However, the big pickle came when I tried setting up Permalinks on IIS7 and PHP5 for WordPress. Jeez Louise! That’s a mother of a bitch! Basically, saying Permalinks, IIS and GoDaddy Subdomains don’t see eye-to-eye is somewhat an understatement. There is an excellent solution that works for most cases, but it assumes you can set the 404 page for each of your domains – another flaw in the GoDaddy subdomain implementation means your hosting account only has one 404 page – irregardless of the number of (sub) domains you have. I literally couldn’t find an ideal way around this, other than to use my main domain name and drop the blog prefix and add it as a suffix instead.

This means that all my URLs are goosed. Again. I almost feel ashamed that I’ve been here before and yet here I am again. None-the-less, it’s not totally bad. The blog subdomain homepage does still work, but all the links now point to their www counterpart but don’t exist on blog.

The pain suffered through this process is exhausting, but there is light and I’m happy. Hopefully I’ll like GoDaddy and won’t have to do that for at least long enough for me to forget how painful it actually was!…

I think I’m gonna bill the new domain name as a strategic re-branding to harness the dynamic synergy of Web 2.0: http://www.amadiere.com/blog/ I guess it’s time for me to actually brand the site somehow, instead of using all the downloadable themes…