08 Jul A Momentary Interuption…

Following the experience and recommendation of a fellow blogger, I have taken the plunge, credit card now fully wet, and switched to a new host: Unlimited Domains at HostICan.

It certainly wasn’t their “am I an Apple clone or am I a hosting provider?” name that sold me—but what matter name when unlimited sites and unmetered traffic are on the line?

My current, soon to be previous host A Small Orange have been more than good—in fact excellent—their support is the best I have yet encountered, and if name and design counted for everything I would be forever faithful. What price their love? Only $25 per year. I would still highly recommend them to anyone seeking cheap, friendly hosting for a single site.

However, I am a web developer by trade, too busy for the moment to be a writer by hobby, and managing well into double figures websites, each with a separate account, password and settings, is starting to become too much; $10.95 a month for one very big orange—in fact as many as I can juggle—has purchased my fickle affection. Purchased also all the standard, even decidedly gourmet after-dinner options: Fantastico, phpMyAdmin, unlimited MySQL databases, one click WordPress installation, Drupal etc etc.

I won’t bore you all with the account of my manual re-installation of this WordPress site, including transferring the MySQL database—but suffice to say, full A Sensitivity to Things service, served hopefully a little faster, will resume very shortly—the new host’s nameservers, quite the busy little robots, are propagating themselves as we speak.

Now if only I could find the time to actually write something…

Update: Propagation complete, at least in this part of the interweb, my shiny new site has at least one major problem—apostrophes converted to gibberish… ’”! Not being inclined to manually re-enter typographically correct apostrophes, single and double quotes, en-dashes and em-dashes in no less than 63 posts, and rather more than that comments, I am now on the hunt for a solution, a point for starting the high possibility that the problem was caused by my upgrade to WordPress 2.2.1. Grrrr!

Solution: (Warning—technical jargon ahead). Gibberesh appears to have descended when I exported the MySQL database from my old web host, not when importing to the new host, as when I opened the exported database in a text editor, there were all the converted apostrophes etc. That was also the solution—doing a find and replace in the database file with a text editor (TextMate is my preference)—and re-exported the already imported, latest version of the database from the new site  allowed me to keep about 15 comments and 2 new posts that had appeared since the change-over. Which doesn’t explain why the character mangling happened in the first place however…