The Burgess Blog

Well As you probably noticed, I switched to a different hosting provider lately. Initially I have been hosted on a2hosting. I used them because of their php5 support. Back in December of last year, I knew php5 and wanted to use the new features in php5. Yet, it was quite new so there were only a few hosting companies that offered it. a2hosting was the best one I could find. So I signed up for a hosting and a domain. I realized that for 10 bucks a month only 300 megs of space was not very much. I made sure that I didn’t go over it, and generally I was fine. I loved that they used cPanel, and the site was down only once, that I know of. There servers were a tad slow, but acceptable. I would recommend them to anyone. As I said I didn’t like the small amount of space and bandwidth. So, I decided that when my time ran out, I would change hosters. I found Dreamhost. They had a very good 10 dollar plan. It came with 4.8 gigs of space and 120 gigs of bandwidth. Another really cool feature was that every week my space increased by 40 megs, and my bandwidth increased by a gig. Also there were unlimited MySQL databases, instead of my previous 3. The plan had php5 and everything I wanted so I decided to switch. I also wanted to move my domain from a2hosting. So, I have used godaddy previously, and I moved it there. That was a breeze to do.

So now I had bought 2 years of dreamhost service. I have to do the worst things possible, move EVERYTHING. The first thing I had to do was change the DNS records of the domain to point to the new dreamhost name servers. I did that monday night, knowing that it would take at least 12 hours for that to take effect. I woke up the next morning, seeing that my domain was pointing to an empty location. This was good. Thankfully, I had a two hour delay from snow that morning, so I went to work. My first mission was to export the three databases from my previous host. I had one for php-nuke, and two wordpress databases. So I went into phpMyAdmin and exported them all. I then uploaded them to the new host and went into shell, to import them. The two wordpress imports worked beautifully. The php-nuke one though had a single error. I looked at the export file, and for somereason one of the tables, was a import command. That was weird, so I just erased that and it imported fine. Now I had to upload everything. So I first downloaded every thing from my previous site and started the upload. I had to go to school then. I figured that the the site would finish uploading and then the site would be up and running. Of course, while uploading, either my ftp client (Kasablanca) crashed, or the ftp connection timed out and the upload didn’t finish. I had to stay late that night for school and didn’t get home and done with my homework before 11. I had to go to bed so it was going to be the next day. Wednesday morning and opened up a different ftp client (KBear) and uploaded. It finished by the time I got home, but when I went to the site, the front page news wasn’t there and errors were all over the place in the forums section and many other places. I couldn’t figure it out. So I finished my homework and went to bed. Thursday morning I thought maybe it was the import error that I got that might be causing these problems. So I went back and compared the dreamhost MySQL database to the a2hosting MySQL database. The dreamhost MySQL database had about 8 less table than the a2hosting database.I saw that the dreamhost database had all of the tables up to the phpnuke_sessions table. I re-imported the MySQL database to try and get those missing tables, but when I re-imported, I got that same error. This time I looked and saw it had to do with the phpnuke_sessions table.

Now, I have to figure out why phpnuke_sessions is not importing. So, I went and looked what was in it. It turned out that it was a malformed php import statement. It works wonderfully in php, but not in the export script. So I just told PHPMyAdmin to export just the tables after phpnuke_sessions. I then imported those into the new database, and everything worked perfectly. Just to make sure, I then manually moved the phpnuke_sesssions table to the new dreamhost MySQL database.