Saturday 17 September 2011

gardiner-smith.com, new home

The gardiner-smith.com domain  and hosting (mostly used for the our mail addresses) have been hosted by the same service for over 10 years and the services have not change one iota in that time and I was still paying the same price.

Nowadays, e-mail messages are much larger and I had been having quota problems so I decided that I would look if I could get a better deal. I first tried my existing mail/web host service (flump.net) and discovered that they were still talking about the same packages as I got 6 years ago with spaces measured in MB still!! What is more they have not updated their site in 4 years, I think maybe they have lost interest.

After a quick look around it looked like hostpapa had one of the best deals with pretty much unlimited space/bandwidth and a great set of services for €2.95/month. Compared to my 250MB limit for about twice that. They also offered a free domain for life (as long as you stay with them I guess) so I was able to transfer gardiner-smith.com from from register.com to tucows (host papa's registry) at no cost. Their pre-sales on-line support was excellent and instructions for set was clear

Planning the move was quite nerve wracking making sure that the break in service was as short as possible but I need not of worried. I was given an ip address at host papa which allowed me to set up mail accounts and stuff, then once the auth code had been requested &  received from the old registry (requiring a phone call and them pleading with me to stay for 10 minutes)  and passed on to the new registry all I had to do was wait. I backed up the old mailboxes and up a redirect on my old mailbox so I knew when that stopped redirecting the new domain address had been propagated. It all took 4 days from signing up to being transferred (with no loss as far as I know). Most of that time was just waiting for the internet to propagate my new address through the global DNS. Now a lll I need to do is shut down the old service.

Upshot is I am now running gardiner-smith with hostpapa. No homepage yet, but you can look at some photos of my new grandson and our China holiday at http://gardiner-smith.com/pictures/.

If all goes well over the next few weeks I might go back to hosting my own blog rather than using bloodspot. Mainly depends on how difficult the migration is.

p.s. The more observant may have noticed a few posts from my old 2002/2003 architecture blog just for nostalgia's sake.


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