Is blog.hsoi.com back? You tell me please… because DNS propagation is a thing.
I’m undertaking a long-overdue migration of my IT services (web, email, domain names, across numerous sites). It’s two-fold:
- Move away from MacHighway.com / Deluxe.com
- Clean up, refactor, discard or pay technical debt, start “fresh”.
Move
Many years ago I hosted with a provider: ItsAMac.com. I’ve loved Apple since the IIe. An ISP that groks Mac and even uses Xserves? Sweet! Plus they were small and had great customer service. Life was good. They rebranded to MacHighway.com, then started noticing the changes getting… generic. cPanel is life now. And then, hardware/server migrations… over and over. Eventually seeing that the company was sold to someone, then another. I don’t recall all the history, but the latest was to Deluxe.com, which has been the worst. They heavily botched a server migration (which I am to understand from the Twitterverse that they were putting servers on trucks and driving them to a new center). Handling was terrible, from a customer service perspective. It was the final straw, and I overcame inertia and moved.
I am now using A2 Hosting. Jury is still out if it was a good move or not, but after much digging around, compare/contrast vs. my needs, and they seemed right. Small incremental trials have proven good, including their customer service who have been responsive, patient, and helpful. Yes, the quality of answers can vary from service rep to rep, but overall it’s good. Best is they are responsive. It may take a couple back and forths, but it gets figured. So, on that alone I’m pleased with the move so far.
Oh and the site is fast is fast as fuck, boy. (meme)
Forward
This was a perfect opportunity to just discard, clean up, and move on. hsoi.com used to have some basic and crude .html files that I wrote probably in BBEdit. This was in the days before CSS and responsive and whatnot: just text, maybe using a table for layout. It was what it was for the time, but… it’s time to go. I am sad that the “MacOS MUD Zone” is no more – it was kinda fun being the Mac MUD dude, but the reality is those were Classic Mac apps and it’s just time to let it all go. WordPress is a thing now.
One thing I’ve long wanted to do is migrate the blog from wordpress.com to my own wordpress.org install. I figured this would be the right time.
I was… half right.
This is a good time, but I should have waited and done it in two phases: 1. get away from MacHighway/Deluxe, 2. do new modern stuff. I started to blend 2 into 1 because this project has been taking a while and with so many things that require “just wait” (e.g. DNS propagation), I thought I could overlap.
However, the migration from wordpress.com to wordpress.org hasn’t been so straightforward, especially because a subdomain is in place: which currently points to and is required really for the wordpress.com-based site to operate, but also needs to be the same subdomain for the wordpress.org install. So… this caused some “false starts” (including trying to use WordPress Multisite). Eventually I realized things weren’t working, needed to back out, but something got hosed with DNS. It took some time, but it looks like A2’s “advanced” support may have gotten things back on track.
I need to wrap up the “Move” portion of things, THEN once I know it’s clean, do the “Forward” part.
So I think I have things “back to how they were before”. I am going to complete my move away from MacHighway/Deluxe. Once that’s good, I’ll look at migration.
This project has taken way too long and caused me enough grief; but I’ve learned a lot.
Stuff From Hsoi 
I just transitioned to Epik from Machighway, for much the same reasons. They were great when I first started with them, but the last year in particular, well, it went really badly. Including me getting hacked via the backend files, repeatedly, that only stopped when I pointed out that I’d done everything possible on my end so maybe they should DO SOMETHING. The f-ed up server move was right in the middle of that too.
Oh, so you were with MacHighway too? And you got hit by that right in the middle of the botched migration? Oof… But glad you escaped too.
I miss the days of Chris Graves and Tyler Jacobson from the itsamac and early-machighway days. They were great then.
As hacks go it was mild, someone kept getting in and changing my user name so I couldn’t log in. That was literally all that was being changed. But it happened 3 or 4 times. Then after that stopped somehow the files kept getting corrupted?? But not when I was running updates of any kind…again, I’d file a ticket, they’d fix it, and a couple weeks later it’d happen again. And its really amazing how it stopped when I finally had an absolute snit over it.
They were awesome when I first signed up with them. The rare problem was fixed with no fuss or bother and done right the first time.
The switch to Epik went smoothly (well, Machighway couldn’t manage some of the turning off of billing on their end very well, but the Epik side of it went great), and they’ve been very responsive to me asking questions on how to do this or that on their platform.
I have wanted to be a fly on the wall in the support centers to see what they actually do and don’t do…
Glad tho that your switch went well. So far it’s been OK for me, tho trying to migrate this blog here from wordpress.com to self-hosted has been an exercise in pain and suffering. Sigh.