Hosting Switch
Well, we have made the switch to our new host. I changed the DNS early Saturday morning, and it looks like it has resolved in most places. There were some hitches, as always. The best piece of advice for any developer is that no matter what your project, and no matter how covered you think the bases are, something will always come up that you didn't expect. More often than not (at least in my experience) a few things will surprise you.
My surprises were relatively mellow. There were some fie permissions that needed to be set, which was easy enough to spot. Initially our forum did not want to work, but it turned out that a couple of files were lost during the FTP sessions, so that was just a matter of replacing them. Our Start-up Notes blog was copied over the same as the other two blogs, but for some reason it didn't want to work initially either. That was a strange one, I ended up re-uploading the files and replacing the database, and all was well. Then the major stuff began...
Our subscription application needed to be adjusted quite a bit. It was writing directory paths to files and those were set up for the old server. So I needed to go through and replace those with the new directory paths, and then rebuild the database and such. Once that was complete it seemed like the job was done. Nope. I then noticed that two major problems existed: 1. The premium content wasn't available due to our subscription system; and 2. You couldn't click through our ads. A message about too many redirects appeared.
The first one was a matter of cleaning up the .htaccess files that the subscription application uses. They had old server paths in them, and some other directives that weren't need on the new server. Luckily that one was pretty easy, and I hope that not too many subscribers were inconvenienced.
The second problem was a PHP thing. Since we now have a dedicated virtual server I was able to configure PHP the way I wanted, which is a nice change from our old hosting company. Due to that, I needed to make a few adjustments to the scripts to account for my new settings. That one was also worked out pretty well, and the site should be working fine.
However, if anyone notices any strange behavior, or something on the site that isn't working, please send me an email with a description and screenshot (if possible) and I will get that taken care of.
