Moving a site is not something people generally like to do. It involved making sure you have a good backup and some luck on the switch over of DNS, which in my case so far this week has been a bit flaky – well slow perhaps.
Just when I thought everything was over and in place I learn that some ISPs are actually caching DNS entries so they are much slower and in those cases actually delivering a 403 not found error as I’ve already deleted the old pages and databases. Oh well – soon enough I hope.
I thought I’d comment on my experience so fellow bloggers and active Googlers might gain from my pain. I’ve got an account with 1and1 and found the initial service to be great, the control panel to be great and speed of site to be great. The issue was that no matter how hard I tried – and I tried man – there was no way to get the MySQL database to allow my MT site to read and write without error. I really hammered Six Apart initially when I began this process and while service was a bit tricky, Ben was really helpful in advising me of what to try. 1and1 just does not seem to support MT, though another site of mine which is a private family site runs just fine. The only think I can think of is that the database is much larger and causing some issues on rebuild. I can’t actually make the db smaller and expect it to continue to grow as I post more and expand what I want to do with my site.
After a great deal of effort I decided to move to Pair. So far (I realize it is only days) they have been great. MT installed without issue, I was able to rebuild and post generally without issue and find that after making some changes to the MT.cfg file courtesy of Adriaan at Neoteny/Kung-Foo all is in fact excellent. I was running into some strange errors in both NetNewsWire and Ecto when posting which have now been resolved…
Thank you everyone for your support!