Website Migration

A very frustrating week is coming to a close. Thankfully. Migrating websites from one host to another is such an enormous pain that it almost makes you want to stay with the bad host just to avoid the hassle. In fact, I'm positive many sub-par web hosting companies maintain their business simply because the webmasters don't want the hassle of moving their site to a better company.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we've moved the OutskirtsPress.com website a number of times as we've grown and learned what elements of a host are non-negotiable (customer service is number one in my book) -- it's something I've instilled in my company.

Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to "take my ball and go home" -- or, in other words, stop paying the previous host since we've now successfully completed the migration, I find myself wanting a complete back-up of the site on a different host entirely, just to avoid downtime (longer than the DNS switch takes, at any rate). So, not only was I not satisfied with their responsiveness, but I have to keep paying them just so we have a backup site. And yes, I finally remembered the bad host. NetInfoLink. Yes, you. Bad customer service haunts you.

I was out and about on business most of the week, which is the reason (but not excuse) for the poor posting performance this week. But now I'm back to the grindstone and back to my family. Isn't my boy cute?

That's a rhetorical question. Of course he is.

So, speaking of website migration, the difficulty with moving to another host was exasperated by the change in PHP versions. The new one has 4.0. I saved all our files in 3.0. So I had to rename all the files to 4.0, and then change all the links in the site to point to the new files. Not an easy thing. Relatively annoying, in fact. What's more perturbing, this only affected Netscape and Mozilla browsers. Explorer was fine.

Believe it or not, the live-chat customer service representative (let's call him... Frank) actually suggested this as a solution: Just tell all your visitors to use Explorer. They shouldn't be using Netscape, anyway.

So, yes, even GOOD customer service is remarkably bad.

But alls well that ends well. The site is fully operational now, even though we experienced a drought in terms of new business this week. That's what happens when a page is down or a graphic is missing. If you're asking an author to trust you with their manuscript and livelihood, your website has to demonstrate the highest degree of competence. I'm always surprised when I look at some of our competitors sites that they can manage to convince anyone to publish with them. If their website looks crappy, doesn't that reflect on the quality of the book they're going to produce?

At OutskirtsPress.com we're proud of the sophistication and intuitiveness we've brought to the site, and hopefully it communicates the quality of our work with publishing our authors' books.