It wasn’t really a fun night last night. I started the process of moving my blog from GoDaddy’s servers to DreamHost’s servers at about 9:00 PM. The goal was to also move my blog from www.childrensministryonline.com/blog down to just www.childrensministry.com.

By midnight, the site had transfered and was in it’s new location. Woo hoo! However, I had a problem. My images didn’t transfer with me. Crud! I figured I could play with it and maybe fix that later.

On to step two, edit the .htaccess file to set up a 301 redirect. For the last two year, my blog has been at the www.chidlrensministryonline.com/blog location and individual posts look like “www.childrensministryonline.com/blog/randompostname. Since I was moving everything out of the /blog directory, I was essentially breaking links. There are thousands of links comign into my site and most of them are pointing to specific posts with/blog in it. So the redirect help take those incoming links and point them to their new location. So, I upload the .htaccess file and that’s where things go downhill quickly. Epic fail. The entire site goes down. I spend the next 3-4 hours trying to undo what I had done. Essentially I worked until Dreamhost shut down for an hour to update their servers.

I get up this morning and basically start over. I reinstalled wordpress, but when I imported the posts again, it didn’t bring in the images again. I decided to temp fate again and upload a new .htaccess file (I knew what I did wrong the first time around). Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t work again (except this time I didn’t bring the whole site down).

So, here is where I am at. My RSS feed is working, so those who had subscribed to my feed in the past shouldn’t see any bumps in their service. I’m currently updating sme plugins and making sure everything else is working the way it is supposed to. As far as images not carrying over, I may cut my losses. I only include images in about 30-40% of my posts. So I might look at my analytics to see what my most popular posts with images are and fix those posts. I’m also launching a new theme soon and I’ll probably change my strategy for including images depending on how they look it.

Last of all. I’m going to need someone to help me with the .htaccess file. If I can get that done in the next few days or so, then I’ll be fine. Honestly, I’m about ready to just cut my losses and just go with what I’ve got. I’ve spent 10-12 hours on this migration and it really isn’t the best use of my time. So, there you have it.

Thanks again for reading!