brentashley

When I recently moved my ashleyit.com site to imhosted, I decided to upgrade Movable Type and move from Berkeley DB to MySQL. I thought it would be easiest to simply export all my entries from the old system and import them into the new.

This worked for a while until I realized that all my old posts were not where they were expected to be by external links and search engines. It seems that export/import doesn’t preserve post IDs – they just all get resequenced.

Since I still have the old site at PHPWebhosting, I was able to grab the old db files, bring them across, and get everything back to where it was, import the few entries I’ve done since the move, and I’m off to the races again. I think I’ll just keep it on Berkeley DB at this point – MySQL just required an extra sql dump in my nightly backups anyhow.

You’ll notice that indeed, I’m holding onto two hosting services. I’m using mail from PHPWebhosting and web services from imhosted. I can swap from one to the other at a moment’s notice because I keep my DNS at ZoneEdit, an ass-saver of great renown.

At 2 X US$9.95 per month, I have a total of a half a gig of storage, with redundant web and mail, two separate shell accounts, cron jobs, raw logs, you name it.

And many corporations pay hundreds of dollars a month to have people host their low traffic brochure sites.