Migrating websites

In the past I have complained to my host provider about the server frequently getting blacklisted. I even subscribed to AOL feedback loop so that I got to see when AOL subscribers were reporting the server for email abuse. Several times there were particular domains getting mentioned that suggested that their hosting account was being used for SPAM. Also particular domain were not being very good with newsletters and several subscribers were reporting them through the Feedback loop – perhaps the unsubscribe link didn’t work, or they had never subscribed in the first place. I understand that they dealt with some of the infrigements. Occasionally it was suggested that I was transfrred to a different server that had a better reputation i.e. the people who were hosted on it tended to behave. But when I mentioned that I had a reseller account the suggestion was withdrawn.

Anyway after one particular incident the suggestion of migrating to a different server was not withdrawn so I decided to go ahead with it. So the other friday afternoon the content of my sites were transferred to another server.

Previously the database had been on a different server – now it was on localhost. The database connection details are usually held in a configuration file somewhere so the applications know how and what to connect to. So in a few spare minutes on Friday night I started changing the database connection details – from web10 to localhost, only to find that things did not work.

The application files on all the sites had been transferred but only one site had its database copied across. And because I had just told them to get on with it I didn’t have a backup.

Fortunately the database on the original server was still accessible by the hosting company so they put an SQL database export from all the sites on an FTP server for me.

I only had to split the SQL scripts of one of the sites into manageable chunks but it was not until later that I was told that the majority of the Friends of Baildon Moor Information for Users posting was missing. After a bit of investigating I found that strage left and right single quotes that Word puts into a document was to blame. Changing the left and right single quotes to normal escaped single quotes fixed the issue.

Hopefully this is all part of getting things fixed so that i now have a long and uneventful hosting experience.