MediaTemple New Server Migration
In January I started noticing some problems with my website hosted by MediaTemple. I was getting constant ‘Database errors’ and nothing I did seemed to work. I was hosting my personal blog and a handful of other sites that I like to call my “hobbies” and the fact that all of my sites were up 10 days out of the month was not making me a happy guy. I started using MediaTemple from a recommendation of a friend and they were an easy service to use and up until these issues, I had no issues at all.It got to the point that I was ready to leave and just start using a new host but I wanted to give MediaTemple some time to see if we could get my sites to a place where they were up most if not all of the time. Good thing their support and Twitter contacts were so helpful because if not, I would have made the switch and this post would not be going down the same path.
Server Migration
After a lot of back and forth on what was going on with the sites from analysing the overhead of the server to looking at specific MySql databases, it turns out I had just out grown the grid-server I was using and had to upgrade. I would be moving from the Grid-Service (gs) to a dedicated virtual (dv). Since I was staying with the same host, I figured it would be easy for them to pick up my stuff and just plop it down on my new dedicated service and we would be happy campers. I was very mistaken. The server migration has to be done by me, again, not a huge deal, I can be technical if need be but I didn’t realize that I would have to learn details about command line scripts to backup and restore MySql databases and import them into the new home. As I said before, good thing their support people are so nice, I had them walk me through this on this blog and it took a few tries but we got it working.
Moving some of the other sites I have will be a bit easier. Nothing I was hosting is as large as my blog so I can’t imagine such a painful process. The next site I wanted to move all on my own was HyperLocal Edge. For the most part its a dormant site. I haven’t updated it in a while but the content is still very relevant. Since the databases were small enough, I could run the operations through PhpMyAdmin for export and import them into the new server. I did, they all moved over right but when I pointed the domain to the new location…nada. Yes, I learned how to reconfigure the wpconfig.php to make sure the blog had a conversation with the database. But for some reason, that didn’t work so the site looks like a brand new site with nothing but a “Hello World” post. I’m waiting to hear from MediaTemple support what could have gone wrong.
So the main issue is resolved. This blog, my online life, is back up. Thank God for Twitter and Facebook, I don’t know what I would have done without them.
