WebMy wife and I are planning to move within the next year to a different city. My wife has some plans that cannot be realized where we now live. So, we are starting to prepare ourselves to move.

There are very few things in live that I have more than moving. Some of the things that make it completely unbearable include:

  • Digging through everything that you own and deciding whether or not it is worth keeping
  • Getting rid of all the junk you don’t want
  • If we have a yard sale to get rid of our stuff, I hate haggling with people over whether a 15″ CRT monitor is worth 50¢ or 25¢
  • Packing up all of our possessions into as few boxes as possible and then living like nomads for a couple of weeks
  • Daily going through a list of things that needs to be done before the move and still forgetting something
  • Finally getting to the new place and then spending the next two weeks making things usable
  • Realizing that I have too much of one thing (e.g. extension cords) and not enough of another (e.g. patch cables) in the new place
  • Discovering all of the “wonderful” things about the new place that you never knew about (”I wonder why the real estate agent never mentioned that the back alley is converted into an all night drag drip every weekend?”)
  • Realizing weeks later that you missed something really important and it is now too late (”You didn’t get that 99% off everything in the store coupon for SuperTechWarehouse that I mailed to you? Too bad. I think it expired at midnight last night. Didn’t you remember to forward your mail?”)

I have similar issues with moving from one web host to another. I’m always concerned about moving the right data over, will my database still work, will the links still be active, etc. This is why I really took my time before deciding to move to a new web host. Once that decision was made, I needed to make sure that I moved to the right web host. As I mentioned in my previous post Time for a (Webhost) Change, I had a lot of criteria that needed to be met.

I then got the generous offer from Ronnie at AlwaysWebHosting to sponsor the hosting of my blog! I was ecstatic but cautious. I checked out his systems to see if they actually met my requirements and they did. Ronnie and I talked via e-mail extensively about various aspects of their systems and services.

I was about to tell Ronnie that I want to go ahead and move things over but before I did that, I decided to back up Daily Cup of Tech to my system at home. This took me over an entire day to complete but, better safe than sorry, right?

I then started on the long list of things to do. I was not really looking forward to this part of the process but it was a necessary evil. I then remembered something that Ronnie had written in one of his e-mails that immediately made me smile! Ronnie wrote, “we can transfer your site over, including all files, databases, and even email”!

So, essentially, instead of me spending the weekend making a list of all the possible things that I need to do, forgetting half of them, and then fighting to keep the website up and running, I spent the weekend with my kids and the AlwaysWebHosting team went to work.

All in all, it took AlwaysWebHosting just under seven hours to transfer the files off my old host and three hours to reconfigure the entire website! All this while supporting all their other customers as well! All I needed to do was exit my DNS settings to point to the AlwaysWebHosting DNS servers and I was in business.

There was one very minor change that I needed to request and that was dealt with in a matter of minutes. It probably would have been dealt with even faster had I requested it over the phone as opposed to sending it via e-mail!

And I’m so totally impressed with my new “home” on the web. Great bandwidth. Awesome web control panel. Super technical support. I don’t think I could ask fro anything more!

Now, if only AlwaysWebHosting had a moving company!

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Tim Fehlman