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… ’â€! 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…
T.Pettinger
Posted at 22:16h, 08 JulyThanks for clicking through on my site, I hope it proves a good experience, after all the ‘ have gone. 63 posts it could have been worse
Jaitra Gillespie
Posted at 22:20h, 08 JulyThanks for that. I’m nearing the conclusion that it may have been importing the MySQL database that may have converted all apostrophes and single and double quotes, although other WordPress users are reporting the same phenomena, so we will see.
Luckily I know a database programmer who is going to instruct me on the arcane art of charmod…