I’ve mentioned before just how stressful and nerve-wracking it can be to move web hosts. That’s why I’ve been putting off the long-overdue migration of The Session from the hell that is WebServePro.
Meanwhile, the server problems continued to pile up: network connections going from slow to stop, tech support people giving me the brush off, etc.
Late Saturday night, I came back from playing a concert to find that the database on The Session was corrupted. I was getting no joy from the tech support people ("Oh yeah, that’s a really old server") but I managed to SSH in and repair the corrupted tables. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back: I immediately opened up a new account with Segment Publishing and began the big migration. I stayed up ‘till 4am doing MySQL dumps, FTPing files and configuring PHP scripts.
Luckily, Jeremy Bogan was on iChat to metaphorically hold my hand each step of the way.
The site was moved over and the DNS information was updated when I had to deal with the next obstacle in my path to server happiness. Segment Publishing upgraded to PHP5 today.
PHP5 would appear to be a bit less tolerant than its predecessors and some of my more sloppily coded include() statements needed to be rewritten. It also turned up some XML errors here and over at WordRidden.
I’ve spent most of the day tracking down and stomping on the bugs. I’ve also been rewriting the PHP I use for Google’s web services to take advantage of the native SoapClient support in PHP5. Overall, PHP5 looks like quite a leap in terms of Object Oriented Programming and the new XML functionality looks very promising indeed.
So it’s been a lot of work but it’s more than worth it to be finally free of WebServePro. Seeing the service deteriorate over the past few years has been like watching a slow train wreck. Avoid them at all costs.
Between moving web hosts and playing a concert, I haven’t had much to time to do anything else like, say, get any work done. I haven’t even had time to procrastinate properly.