No, not blogging, that’s still fun 🙂 moving my website to
So what have I learned through this exercise? For starters website migrations, no matter how trivial (it’s only a basic blog with 2 pages and 46 posts after-all), just don’t go smooth. 95% of it will work, but then the annoying 5% that didn’t migrate will eat up 23 1/2 hours of your life trying to chase it down and patch it up! I can’t imagine moving a huge corporate or banking website… but I guess that’s what staging environments are for.
So my blog uses a custom theme, has few WordPress and Jetpack widgets, and few custom modifications to the php files by yours truly. Non of that migrated! See, I did an export followed by an import operation, and that only moved the data (posts, pages, comments). So I had to hunt down and reinstall theme and plugins on the new site; then I re-implemented the few php changes to make the theme to my liking again.
But the most irritating part of the export / import process was the fact that the post excerpts vanished into thin air! So when I fired up the site with the new theme all I cloud see were post titles… no excerpts on the front page! Luckily the post content was preserved perfectly. I then looked for and tried four or five different excerpts plugins to no avail, until I found the one I needed: Excerpt Editor. Nothing about it was automatic, but at least it let me rebuild, one by one, my post excerpts. Ufff. That took a while.
Once I got the page up and running the way it was before I immediately purchased a Jetpack Personal plan for $39/year which offers automatic site backups and restorations. It backs up the database (pages, posts, comments) as well as themes, plugins, uploads, etc. Hopefully I’ll never have to use it, but you know what they say… it’s better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it 🙂
Oh, and the site hosting is $10/month, another $30/year for domain name and privacy protection on it. Pretty low price to pay for a total peace of mind!
Finally a word about my website hosting setup up to yesterday: yes it was done from home and a constant source of headaches! For starters I’m on a residential 1Gbit line with 40Mbit upload. Great for streaming 4K TV but not so hot for uploading website content (plus the upload latency was bad). Then there’s the whole dynamic IP address thing… so I had to create a sub domain with my google domain, enable DDNS service on it through my OpenWrt router, and pray it doesn’t change too often. Of course I couldn’t run the web server directly on the router, so I pushed it behind the firewall onto my Qnap NAS. Getting WordPress to run on this thing smoothly was an issue and required plenty of workarounds (like a custom cron job to pull wp-cron.php file every minute from the web server or else the internal WordPress tasks would get delayed and bad things would happen). Just a mess overall. Oh and don’t get me started on using LetsEncrypt certificates for https access. I love that they provide them for free, but for 90 days at a time! Really?! And then there was the weekend I spent figuring out how to serve the intermediate certificate along with my domain certificate from Qnap’s custom build Apache server… so I could get an A rating from SSL Labs 🙂
Anyways, too much venting and not enough C++ in this post so I’ll stop now!
P.S. If you got this far, please re-subscribe to email notifications if you’ve done so in the past. Those sadly didn’t survive the export / import process 🙁
What a rough ride, and the sea still seems to be troubled. I think the 90 days “issue” of letsencrypt is actually a benefit. At least on proper configured Linux system where it’s re registering itself every 90 days, you have to do nothing. This makes letsencrypt even more secure in my opinion, because it’s always exchanging the keys.