Learn by doing

Only a seriously lazy or idiotic person would wait until 3 days before launch to go about the process of switching web hosts. Which is exactly what I’m in the middle of doing for Flicker right now: I’m moving the site from MediaTemple to BlueHost.

To be perfectly honest, there was nothing *wrong* with mediatemple except that I need (cross your fingers) more bandwidth for what I’d like Flicker to be. And Bluehost has about…13 times more monthly bandwidth available.

But the process of moving the site over has been interesting so far, and if all goes well, I’ll do it with no down time!

Basically, you get the new hosting, then you switch where the “nameservers” point. In other words, the domain is linked to a certain server location through the massive database somewhere in the US, and you have to change that association.

That association usually takes 6-12 hours in my experience (although they say to allow 36). But for that time, it still points to the old spot…so I have the next 6 hours to get the new site up, working, and indistinguishable from the last one.

Ready? Go!