Website servers and ensuing coding headaches
As a sporadic, self-taught coder it’s hard mental work to deal with the backend mechanisms of producing websites.
I’m a content creator, not a coder.
Generally.
My original website was created back in December 2008. A Mac iWeb site that looked good but had awful technical problems, like, if an upload had a glitch, the entire website needed to be uploaded again. I had 100s of images, and I can tell you that upload speeds in 2009 were not speedy, and very expensive.
It was soon superseded, June 2010, by a real website, cycletrailsAustralia.com.
Others followed: tramping.net.nz, bluelake.co.nz, my worksite nelsonbuildingreports.co.nz, and some for my family.
In 2015 each website needed to be reconfigured to be Mobile First, to be able to be read on small screens.
Then in 2018 security certificates became a thing and something new to incorporate.
My species of hosting was, however, basically that from 2010, and the server could no longer be updated for current security requirements.
My host was depreciating that service, as they informed me, and I needed to move all websites to a new, up-to-date cPanel server.
Back up everything including the database.
Copy the database to the new server.
Copy the website structure, images, and associated files onto the new server. (I discovered that my tramping site had over 5000 images and the same number of thumbnails.)
Update each website’s CMS, content management system.
Change each config file to point to the new server.
Sort out some outstanding security certificate issues.
Rationalise each .htaccess file.
Check everything was working, and that I could still make changes through the CMS once again.
For the five websites.
That just left the sixth website that was hosted elsewhere. Time to make it secure.
Has the process been straightforward?
Well, no.
The change from PHP 5.4 to PHP 7.2 has broken some things. These took a while to find and fix.
But, hooray!! Mission accomplished.
Hopefully, this will future-proof all six websites for a while, until the next big change, and I can concentrate on content production in the meantime.
Writing, not coding, is my actual area of interest.