I’m writing the draft of this post on a word processor (LibreOffice, naturally), for a good reason. We’ve had the same web hosting provider for 17 years, ever since we moved from Missoula to Hamilton in Montana and lost access to ISDN services. For two years before that, we had hosted our own web sites and email from a couple of servers hung from the floor joists, in the basement.

When we needed to find a new home for our Internet presence, Modwest, a new and growing Missoula company, stepped in. The plans they provided were ideal: running on Linux servers, with SSH (Secure Shell) login access and the ability to park multiple domains on one account (at that time, we had two already: parkins.org and info-engineering-svc.com). Everything worked fine, and we added and deleted domains over the years, for ourselves (realizations-mt.com and judyparkins.com) and, temporarily, for clients (onewomandesigns.com). It just worked, and we also added WordPress engines to our personal/business domains. My programming sorted out which domain got served which landing page, and the links from there went to subdomains to keep the filesets separate.

We finally retired the old quilting web site, realizations-mt.com, when the registration expired in early 2018, but rolled the legacy pages into a subdomain of judyparkins.com to keep her client galleries on-line. Then, this spring, Modwest announced they had sold out to Intertune, another web hosting provider headquartered in San Diego. Billing transferred to the new host, with the same pricing. Fine. But, eventually, they told us, the websites and mailboxes would be transferred to the Intertune servers. The Internet thrives on economies of scale—the bigger the organization, the fewer resources are needed for failover, backup, and support.

So, at an inconvenient time (we planned to be out-of-town for a week), they informed us that our parkins.org account would be migrated, so we dutifully switched the collective domains to the new servers, upon which our blogs disappeared, and the other two domains disappeared entirely, along with mail service. Frantic exchanges by phone and email ensued:

Them: “Oh, we’re only migrating parkins.org at this time.”

Us: “But, they share a file set, database, and mailboxes, and have subdomains. It’s one account. And you didn’t migrate the subdomain content at all.”

Them: “Oh, gee, we’ve never seen anything like this. (ed. Note: almost all web hosting services support this.) Switch the others back to Modwest. We’ll get back to you.”

Us: “Unsatisfactory—they are all one and the same, just different names in DNS.”

Us: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

Us: “Our blogs still don’t work, and our mail is scattered across several mail servers.”

Them: “OK, we’ll do what you said, for judyparkins.com and the subdomains.”

Us: “You didn’t. The subdomains sort of work, but the WordPress installation doesn’t, because the three domains are intertwined.”

Them: “OK, try the judyparkins.com now.”

Us: “The blog works, sort of, for Judy’s, but mine doesn’t, and judyparkins.com isn’t receiving mail.

Them: “Oh, wrong mail server. Try it now.”

Us: “OK, now do the same thing for info-engineering-svc.com”

Us: “Hello? Is anybody there? It looks like your servers are pointed the right way, but the email and blogs still don’t work.”

Them: “Oh, wrong mail server. Try it now.”

Us: “OK, the mail works now, but the Larye blog is totally broken: I can’t see blogs.info-engineering-svc.com at all, and the admin page on blogs.parkins.org is broken yet. I can’t publish anything or respond to comments, nada.”

Us: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

Us: “Hello? … Hello?

Now, we could have decided early in this process to not trust them to migrate this successfully and moved everything to a different hosting service, but that would involve a setup fee and transferring all of our files ourselves—which, for the web, isn’t a big deal, but migrating 20,000 emails sitting in hundreds of folders on an IMAP server is—and working through an unfamiliar web control panel, so we didn’t. We should have, as the same level of service, with more space, is actually cheaper on the web hosting service we had before we moved to Montana in 1999.

But, meanwhile,  we’re busy, so a few days passed, and they still hadn’t replied to my latest comm check.  Rather than risk exposing my latent Tourette Syndrome with an expletive-laden outburst via email, I rechecked their servers to see if the info-engineering-svc.com site was working again.  It was, so I switched the domain pointers in ICANN, and waited.  The blog still didn’t work, and I sent another, unacknowledged message to say so.  But, finally, the info-engineering-svc.com blog started working [no reponse from Intertune, but it’s not magic, so they did something], at least in the display mode.  The administrative pages still did not work.

In between guests and visiting relatives, I decided to troubleshoot the WordPress installation, as something was definitely amiss, now that everything was on the same server.  But, changes to the configuration files seemed to have no effect, and a check of the error logs showed the same errors, which didn’t reflect the changes I had made.  A comparison of the installed file set with my backup I had taken before the migration showed no differences: The light begins to dawn, that my blog installation doesn’t match what Intertune is actually serving.

Sure enough, there is a ~/blogs folder, which I had instructed Intertune to configure as the blogs subdomain, and a ~/www/blogs folder, a different version of the wp-admin file set.  After a quick check to make sure that the dozen or two different files in the wp-admin folder were the only differences in the several thousand files in the blog, I copied the version from my backup into the “live” folder, and violá! the admin dashboard appeared, and here we are, composing the rest of the story on-line.

As it turns out, Intertune did not follow my instructions, but did something different, and did not tell me (not for the first time, either).  Somewhere in the middle of the migration, my blog installation got updated, and Judy’s did not, when the blogs were split between Modwest and Intertune, so that the update was only partial, breaking the installation when Intertune took it upon themselves to migrate files I had already manually installed, but to a different location.

So it goes.  One clue was in the WordPress FAQ, which suggested that a HTTP 500 error might be corrected by re-installing the wp-admin directory, which turned out to be the case. Whether we stay with Intertune or not depends on whether we meet any more difficulty with a tech staff that seems incredibly inept, and how much more work we want to do to move our Internet presence to yet another new hosting service, with new rules, and setup fees.  Our old webmail installation no longer works, being reconfigured by Intertune to use their web mail client instead, but we can live with that, and it’s less work for us, though with also less versatility and customization.  Now, to finish tweaking all the PHP-language scripts in the webs for compatibility with PHP 5.3.29.