Thinking of a DIY Website Migration? Think again.

I pride myself in being a daughter of a mechanic. As a result, I like to know what happens “under the hood” in many aspects of life and work. One example of my tinkering has been with my website. The one-epiphany.com website has been a “pet project” or more affectionately – a labor of love. It’s how I cut my teeth so many years ago so that I could understand and learn to speak developer language. In fact, I use my website for the same purpose even today.

My latest endeavor occurred in January when I undertook migrating my website from one host server to a new one. I simply enjoy learning the basic ins & outs of what my development team does even if I never plan to fix or update each & every component or feature myself. No, the website isn’t perfect. No, I’m not a programmer. And no, I’m definitely not the person who will write the code for the next technical project you graciously award One Epiphany :-) .  Now that the focus of my business is evolving and I’m driving more traffic to the website, the purpose (and appearance) of my website will have to change to be representative of the quality of work I provide my clients.  But let’s leave that story for another blog post. Today I am sharing my adventures as a do-it-yourself small business owner; a role I’m sure many of we all take on from time to time…..and shouldn’t.

Now, I had been planning to change host servers for months! The task was never made a priority until I realized the migration was the roadblock (real or otherwise) for why I wasn’t ready to implement the very blog you are reading now as well as some other website updates you’ll see in the coming months. Well, when I make up my mind to do something, I want instant gratification, immediate results. So of course, this was no different. Although there were folks I could call and have the job done in a matter of hours, it was late on a Friday and it was unrealistic of me to think I could find someone to start a job right as the weekend was kicking off.  Even though I had never migrated a website to a new server before, I vowed I would do it myself and get it done before the weekend was out. I honestly expected the migration to take me – a “never ever” – a day, maybe 1.5 days at the most. Well, fast forward 3 days later and I finally got it done! It gave me a huge sense of accomplishment. I even went walking around to find somebody, anybody to celebrate my recent victory over the battle of the server migration. However no matter how victorious I felt, the experience was one of the most frustrating ones at best. Frustrating because….