Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Holiday Project#2 -- Changing Web Hosting Company

Hard to believe but it is true: I am still paying $14.95 per month, the amount I agreed to pay more than three years ago, to host my homepage at pankaj-k.net and do not have access to any of the advanced goodies, such as shell access, hundreds of MBs of storage space etc., that now-a-days is available for much less. To top it, I host another site with a different web hosting company, forking out another $30.00 per month. Though, this one offers many high-end capabilities in ample qunatities -- in fact, enough to satisfy the current needs of both the sites combined and then some.

So, it was no brainer that I should consolidate both sites with the same web hosting company. This is exactly what I had planned to do during Christmas vacation and identified the following tasks:

1. Create a shell account on the target server for keeping all the data and applications.


2. Migrate Application(s): Install the latest version of MovableType, the software that powers my weblog, to the target server. I could simplify my task by copying the current application bits but then I wanted to upgrade this application for numerous other reasons anyway. Luckily, this is the only application that currently runs on the expensive site.


3. Migrate Weblog database.


4. Move other static content.


5. Contact the domain name registrar to change the DNS servers for pankaj-k.net.


6. Get the DNS entries modified so that www.pankaj-k.net and pankaj-k.net point to the new server.


7. Cancel the account with the existing hosting company for pankaj-k.net.

Though I made good progress on installing MovableType 3.14 and migrating the data, this task is not yet complete. My initial plan was to just copy the berkley db files and regenerate weblog pages. For some strange reasons, this didn't work. First, I suspected the problem to be version mismatch for berkley db software and followed the procedure to upgrade the db files, but this didn't help. Then I tried Exporting the weblog entries from existing site and importing that into the new installation. This appeared to work but then I realized that the export doesn't work for uploaded files. So, I needed to take care of these files manually.

Moving static content also turned out to be much more work than I had anticipated. So much so that I am yet not done!