iSean

so, i have a family site, a personal website, a blog, and various class websites. oh, i also have a generic domain pertaining to integrating technology where i hope to host my wiki-based free textbook. but my point is that i have a lot of websites and each one has its own domain name. when i set these sites up, i have been spending time trying to find the best hosting services (shared hosting, it’s what i can afford). many years ago, i used tigertech.net. my family site was small and tigertech met my needs. well it didn’t take long to realize i wanted to fiddle with databases and tigertech wasn’t set up easily for that. so i found iPowerweb. they were great back then. i hosted all of my class stuff with them as well as my personal website. eventually, their cheap rates and need to add more and more customers caught up to them. after sitting on tech support for over 40 minutes, i immediately sought a new solution. i found bluehost and they were great until i had all of my students use one of my tools at the same time — crash. that wasn’t good enough. so i’ve now found lunarpages. whew. i am keeping bluehost and lunarpages for now. i like to run a ghost backup of each of my class sites. each week, i download my class discussion forum database and restore it on the other hosted site, which is hidden. if something were to happen to my main site and it went down, i could quickly switch to my backup in a matter of minutes. i didn’t do that for my first 6 years of teaching online sessions and classes, but i was stupid back then. heh.

anyway, i also still have my family site on the tigertech.net hosted servers. i have 11 days. i have a family blog that has entries back to 2000 hosted there. it’s now in wordpress so i have easily moved it to bluehost. however, i also have all family photos in a tool called Gallery 2. it was a great tool many years ago in the days before Flickr and other online photo sharing sites. well, this is where my problem comes into play. to move my family site, i’d have to also move this Gallery database of years and years of photos. unlike Wordpress and just about every other mySQL database / open source solution, Gallery does not have an easily transferrable method. i cannot transfer the photos from the old site to the new site easily. i cannot import the photos from the old to the the new either. there are very difficult directions to move the database, but my initial attempt failed. so now i am 11 days away from being forced to stick with tigertech for another year. i have already started the transfer process to bluehost, but i will not complete it unless i get the new site up and running first. my students took their final exam today for the spring summer class i was teaching so i guess i have some thesis students and time on my hands. if it’s possible for my feeble mind, i’ll be down to just 2 hosting services (and save $$$ along the way) in the next week. fingers crossed!