The web gods must have taken my last post’s title (”Tune out for a while“)a bit too literally - I’ve been “off the grid” for over a week now. What happened? I’ve just switched my hosting company. Not because my old one was bad in any way, but I had several domains scattered at several hosts, and just wanted to consolidate maintenance.
Let me share the upside first - my new hosting company, DreamHost, has been great to work with so far. Not only that, they provide a very nice incentive program that pays up to $97 in referral fees. And they let me share that with you - if you go sign up with DreamHost and use the promotion code GROBY, you’ll get $50 of that money credited to your new account. That’s almost half a year of free hosting!
The downside? I ran into so many snags, one could write a book about it. Don’t worry, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version - but there were a few interesting lessons in there, should you want to switch.
The funny part is, I practiced that transition on Monday with my staging domain, and everything went just nicely. The transition was complete within less than 45 minutes.
Tuesday, I had too many other things to do, so the transition got postponed. Lesson 1: If you need to switch over, plan for a fixed day, and reserve at least 4 hours for that. Don’t spread it out.
Then, Wednesday night, everything got transferred and set up on the new domain. However, this time round, the IP change didn’t propagate down to the DNS servers quite as fast.
After much digging, I found out why - nobody had accessed my old staging domain for quite some time. So when I did the transfer and looked up the name, the lookup went right up to the DNS root servers - and those get usually changed within minutes.
This address, on the other hand, is visited frequently. So its IP address was sitting in my ISPs DNS cache, and not moving. Using ‘dig’, I found out that the time it would sit there was another day - so I figured I’d just go to work and use my connection there. Most major ISPs had already taken the change, so that should’ve worked. (dnsstuff.com is a fantastic site to look up those things)
Of course, my work connection had things also still in the cache - so no luck there. Since work is a bit more demanding right now, resolution of that issue got postponed to the next morning - Friday now.
The next morning, it turns out Adelphia likes the cached entry so much, it just refreshed it with the same data. A bit of research revealed that a DNS change can take up to 72 hours.
I finally remembered that I could always edit //etc//hosts on my Apple to locally force robertblum.com to the new address, so I could post at least an update. That’s lesson 2 - don’t wait for your DNS change to propagate. Why? Because connecting right away let’s you find problems with your new setup.
As you guessed by now, when connecting to my new site, I was greeted with an error screen. In the transition process, I had migrated to WordPress 2.0. And I’d forgotten to fix up my configuration properly.
Lesson 3: Never make multiple changes at a time. No matter how well rehearsed, it will backfire.
That should be it, though.. Please let me know if you run into any SNAFUs, and welcome back.
Tags: host change, DNS, IP, promo