Big Dadoo @ Bluehost

Well, here we are over at a new hosting site called Bluehost.

Since the inception of my blogging efforts I’ve been hosted over at Media Temple, for free, courtesy of my son Eric, for many years. Now it’s time to strike out on my own and become a fully self sufficient blogger, WordPress site maintainer and issue trouble shooter etc.

The move to Bluehost comes with a few benefits besides being in total control of my destiny. A big one for me was getting SSL fully operational. Things like Jetpack and the WordPress iOS app were having trouble with the old site seemingly because SSL was only sort of installed/working. The WordPress sites were operational but things were not totally 100%. With the Bluehost package SSL is part of the deal, certificates are installed and maintained and I don’t have to do anything, except pay.

The other major benefit is backup. All of my Bluehost sites are getting automagically backed up as part of the package cost. This is a very good thing. You don’t know how good a thing it is until one day, for whatever reason, files or databases are gone, corrupted or whatever and your system is behaving badly or just plain down, a very sad moment. Unless you have backup, then there is hope.

In one of my very first job interviews, at a local insurance company, I was asked “What is the most important thing in IT?” I was fresh out of college, I didn’t have a clue but I rattled of something as best I could. Apparently I got it wrong. His answer was “backup”. I didn’t get the job. However, over the course of my career I did indeed learn that backup is a very important part of any computer system. Interestingly enough I consulted for 5 years with that same insurance company and then became an employee for 6 years. I think they liked me better later in my career.

Moving Day

The first step of the move was to get an account and setup a WordPress site to get the hang of how things are done at a new hosting site. Part of that was getting the new domain, thenewbigdadoo.com, so that I could experiment and learn before committing to moving over the bigdadoo.com/blog and bigdadoo.com/journey sites.

After that the task was to transfer over the /blog and /journey WordPress (WP) sites. This involves a handful of steps. Copy over all the WP files. Export and import one database per site. Change a file called wp-config.php to know about the database name, user id and password to the databases. Files and databases migrated and re-configured it’s time to test out the new sites and…

… close but no cigar! There were problems. Welcome to being fully responsible, let the troubleshooting begin.

Squish the Bugs

First up, there was an issue with the databases or more specifically what I put in wp-config.php about the databases. I’d made a typo in the database and user names which was an easy fix. Now /journey is responding but /blog still has an error, something different.

Being in control of my hosting site allows me to see the server error logs, a good place to look when there is trouble. Sure enough it was complaining about some entries I’d made in the .htaccess file. These entries were fine at Media Temple, but not so fine at Bluehost. These entries are not currently super important so I remove then and /blog is now responding. Yahoo! But wait, there is more.

The next step in the migration called for logging into the WP Admin page. However, when I try to do this on thenewbigdadoo I get redirected to bigdadoo.com. Hmm, what is happening? None of the migration guides mentioned this issue. Google search to the rescue. Turns out there is a database entry called “siteurl” which is still set to bigdadoo.com because I just copied over the entire database. Once I update that using a database utility the WP Admin login functions as expected. But wait, there is still a bit more.

When I tried to upload some media to WP there was another error. After a little hunting I find that instead of the typical default media upload location of /wp-content/upload there was a very specific Media Temple location specified for uploads of media which of course the Bluehost site doesn’t have access to. Updating this setting resolves several issues with media. Almost there.

DNS – Going to the new home

Next up is having references to bigdadoo.com be redirected to thenewbigdadoo.com so that people or systems that have old URLs saved somewhere are transparently redirected to the new sites. The goal is like this:

Requested URL	Redirected to URL	Where you end up
bigdadoo.com	thenewbigdadoo.com	A new WP site (where you are right now).
bigdadoo.com/blog	thenewbigdadoo.com/blog	My original blog in its new home.
bigdadoo.com/journey	thenewbigdadoo.com/journey	My Journey through a Lymphoma cancer diagnosis in its new home.

This kind of stuff is managed by DNS and various DNS/Name Server settings. Step one is to change the Name Servers for the bigdadoo.com domain name. That domain name is managed over at GoDaddy. So, I login there and make the changes by replacing:

Old Name Server	New Name Server
ns1.mediatemple.com	ns1.bluehost.com
ns2.mediatemple.com	ns2.bluehost.com

This according to the migration guide is supposed to be all that is required. However, after refreshing myself with how DNS works at a moderate level I’m not totally convinced this is the whole answer. DNS changes take a while to propagate around the world so I wait a day.

Sure enough I’m not quite there yet. bigdadoo.com now just gets an error. Not the old site, not the new site, just an error. At this point I’m stuck. However, another benefit of owning your own hosting site is that I have direct access to their support staff. I start a chat with a support person who responds almost immediately which is great. I explain my issue and what I want to happen (once, which is also awesome) and they look into what’s going on and come back with “I’ve added bigdadoo.com to your Bluehost DNS configuration page. Wait about 3-5 minutes for the change to take effect and you should be good to go”. Nice.

Sure enough bigdadoo.com is now responding but not quite how I’d expected. That URL is indeed re-directed to thenewbigdadoo.com but is also trying to load a page from the Bluehost site in the directory /bigdadoo. So close. However, since I now have access to some DNS settings for bigdadoo.com I create a re-direct rule with wildcarding (I know a little techie) and success! All the old URLs using bigdadoo.com/anything are re-directing to thenewbigdadoo.com/anything

At this point I believe the migration is complete and in my opinion quite successful. Some minor WP configuring and tidy up and I’m done.