The Headaches of Moving a Site :: The Life of the Traegorn

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The Headaches of Moving a Site
Posted Sep 27, 2010 - 9:56:21

I no longer work as a professional web developer, but I still manage one site - the website for No Brand Con, my beloved convention. I talked about this on Friday, but I'm currently in the act of moving that site to a much better webhost.

This means a lot of things need to happen. Right now, the link above is resolving to the site's old hosting, and it will for a while. No Brand Con though has now purchased an account with the new webhost DrakNet (with a second domain name I wanted us to grab to prevent cybersquatting anyways) where I have to get everything working and ready so we can point the main domain name at the new hosting.

Getting everything working is of course the hard part.

See, No Brand Con's registration system is a custom piece of PHP code which was written by a different former webmaster, rewritten in part by another, and then constantly band-aided by me. It's secure and it works, but the code isn't exactly up to "best practices." And some of the scripts use code that was perfectly valid in PHP4, but doesn't work in PHP5. As DrakNet actually, y'know, updates their servers, this is throwing me errors in parts of the software I've honestly never had to tinker with.

Which means I get to fix them now.

I spent this morning importing test versions of the databases so I could test... which was, of course, a pain in the ass. The No Brand Con forums run a lot of customized code, so I couldn't just dump a blank PHPBB database in there -- I needed real data. So, I had to remember how to export a massive database. What took more time than anything were my failed attempts, as I haven't had to move a database this large in years...

...and after three attempts, I got it to work just fine.

At least when I load the production data, it will be easy, as I'll actually remember how to do some of this stuff. I plan on having this whole thing done by the end of the week though, and then we can leave the old, easily hacked, crappy webhost in the the rearview. I'm also taking this as an excuse to improve parts of the site's backend... so we'll see how that goes.

I can't wait until I'm done with this.
- Traegorn