techie geekie stuff

Well, the last few days have been all about tech stuff that is tweaking my brain! 

Who would have thought this could get so complicated and stressful!

We're into Phase 2 of revisions on the site and one of the things that had to be done is to move the site from one type of hosting service to another. The original business hosting was basic on a shared server. This means that there are other sites also hosted on the same one and it apparently couldn't handle the video stuff we want to be able to use. So I checked into VPS, which are virtual private servers so you basically get your own home server that would be able to handle what we wanted. More money of course! 

But then when we started the revisions which are not going to use as much video, I asked Charles of wicked_pr about the VPS and whether we should still migrate the site. He explained that being on a shared server is not a good idea because if you share with some nasty site (you don't know who your room mates are!) who gets blocked, that means we would get blocked too as we have the same address. And I thought, well, when you google nuts you get a lot of porn sites, so decided to move to the more robust servers.

I was told that it would take from 24-72 hours to move and that the original site would remain live during the migration.

So guess what? The site disappeared! I was on hostgators live chat for what seemed like hours. Initially I was told everything was ok - it was just taking time. I had done everything right, changed nameservers and IP addresses to point correctly. So I waited. And waited.

Last night late and still no site! YIKES!

So back on chat for what seemed like forever! First thing they said, you're not supposed to cancel your original account! Well, of course I hadn't. Oh! So then they dug deeper, and found there was a problem on their end with the nameservers they had assigned to us. Several emails later and back and forth between godaddy (where the domain was purchased)  and hostgator, name changes and IP changes and the site popped up! 

What a relief! "Wow, what a beautiful site," from the hostgator tech guy! That was cool :)

So this morning, more emails, changing stuff again, back to different nameservers and IP addresses and now I am waiting for the updated usernames and passwords so I, and the programmers, can access the back end, or behind the scenes part of the site so we can continue on.

Man. talk about stressful! Good thing I go to yoga today!

But now I can move on to the rest of the stuff that needs to be done.

It's OJT for me, very cool.