Behind the scenes there has been a great deal of activity here on my website over the last month. Once I got my renewal letter from my hosting provider I finally decided to make a major change and move all my files to a new host, Bluehost.
I had been with my previous provider for over 7 years but learned over the last several that there were some performance issues with their servers in general, or the server on which they had parked my site.
So I made the switch and have been very happy, for the most part, with the experience.
But here’s what I discovered.
The movement of thousands of photographs means that a whole bunch of electrons had to fly through space and be reassembled on the new site and on occasion, something in that process went very wrong.
The total amount of files affected was probably in the range of 1 or 2 percent, but when you are moving thousands and thousands of files. that means a whole bunch of corruption.
I’ve spent a day or two having to download all the files from the web to a folder that I could then examine, find and identify the corrupted files and then delete them and upload backup files in their place. I tried doing a simple over-write but sometimes the corruption just wouldn’t go away.
As with lots of things in life this experience has come with good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve had a chance to look over lots of images and the total organization of the site, and I have come up with some design changes that will be implemented soon.
It has also led to lots of thoughts that go something like this, “Oh, I forgot I have those photos uploaded and ready to post, I really need to write about that.”
There was a lot of that, and hopefully some of that will be remedied in the future, because the photos do jog the memories.
But for now, my conclusion is that I’m keeping out of transporters. They may work on TV, but I’ve got the evidence that they just are not up to par yet in real life.
I will say however, that the staff at Bluehost has been the MOST helpful in working through the issues of migrating multiple databases and all of my prior stats. I could not be more pleased with their assistance.