Now I have even less hair! A tale of caution.

I have never pretended to be an expert when it comes to websites. My background is in hardware. Building, fixing or rebuilding a computer is about the best way for me to relax. The fact this site exists at all is testament more to my Googling skills than my coding skills.

We've been looking into moving the site onto a new server. It's not the first time we've done it, and it's not going to be the last time. This time however, things took a less than desirable turn. First thing you do is copy the entire site from one server to another. Then you do all the fixings before telling the rest of the internet to point everyone to the new server. If you're unaware of what a server is, it's essentially a computer set up to hold your website on it. Simply put, what we're doing is copying the site from one computer in the building to another, then telling the world that the site's on the other computer now.

I did a backup to the new server easily enough. The problem was that it then immediately told the world that the site was on the new server before it was set up properly. That fix turned out to be fairly simple. The big problem was that everything worked again except we couldn't receive any emails. We could do everything else, but we weren't receiving any emails. For some reason, during the backing up, the software had changed some of the settings on the old server to point incoming email to the new server. After a day of my pulling my hair out trying to solve the problem, we ended up having to outsource the issue to someone far more competent than us. They managed to fix it within a few short hours. When we do the actual move to the new server, we're going to use them again to do it. If all goes well, no one other than us will even know anything's been done. Best to leave it to the professionals this time, right?