Website Migration Progress

This is an update to my post about my progress (more like an exhausting struggle) in getting my three websites moved to a new server.  View my previous post for background information.

How I Wasted a Saturday...

In short, I created three websites on the Yahoo! GeoCities site around 20 years ago.  GeoCities was later shut down, and the Yahoo! web hosting has been rebranded multiple times.  It appears that the web hosting service was sold last year to Turbify.

I didn't mention in my last post that I had found a message in late January in my email informing me that I needed to change the DNS settings for Series-Books.com by February 13, or else the site would go down.  I had never received such a notice before, and this was an indication that the web hosting service is no longer connected to Yahoo! in any fashion. 

I went to figure out what the Turbify message meant and discovered that the file manager had changed.  I had no idea what to do about the DNS, so I decided that it was time to jump off the Yahoo! GeoCities train.  If I was going to have to learn how to use a new interface anyway, then I needed to gain control of the situation.

That's what I have been doing the last few weeks.  The incredible amount of work involved is exactly why I had stayed with my original accounts. 

I have set up three GoDaddy web hosting accounts and have been working on migrating the sites off of Turbify and onto GoDaddy.  I will now be in full control, and the Yahoo! GeoCities train cannot continue to take my sites to random places.

NewWorldZorro.com is finished.  It has been fully moved to GoDaddy and looks good in all browsers. 

Series-Books.com is on GoDaddy and looks good in all browsers except for Google Chrome.  The problem is that some images are on ZorroLegend.com.  Some are also on NewWorldZorro.com, but NewWorldZorro.com has been moved to GoDaddy, so those images are fine.  For whatever reason, the Chrome browser won't load the images from the Turbify server onto the sites as hosted by GoDaddy. 

On the surface, this makes no sense.  The HTML files for Series-Books.com have the full URLs to the images on ZorroLegend.com.  The images load fine in the other browsers, just not Chrome.  I have a suspicion what the problem might be, but it's not worth investigating since I'm going to close the Turbify accounts sometime soon.

You might be wondering why many of the Series-Books.com images are hosted by the other two sites.  This goes back to the free GeoCities sites that I originally created.  The storage space was limited, and I had so many images for the series book cover art galleries that I had to place a bunch of them on the other two sites.  I have left them where they were placed even though I have had paid accounts for more than 15 years.

This week I worked on migrating ZorroLegend.com to GoDaddy.  Once complete, all of the images on Series-Books.com should show up again on Chrome.  Turbify has not changed ZorroLegend.com to the new file manager.  The other two sites had been changed, so I was able to create backup files that I then uploaded to GoDaddy.  Since ZorroLegend.com is still on the old file manager (as in the old Yahoo! GeoCities version from 20 years ago), I have to use FTP.  I first had to learn how to use it, and with my thyroid-impaired brain, that gave me some difficulty.

I figured it out and got the files migrated.  However, around 500 of them failed.  Some hosting services limit FTP to 2000 files, and ZorroLegend.com has over 2,500 files.  Turbify is making this hard for me by forcing me to use FTP and then I am limited on the number of files that can be transferred.

I realized that I could just do another transfer but start with other folders.  Most of the missing files were transferred over.  I then manually looked for missing files.

Today I changed the name servers for ZorroLegend.com over to GoDaddy, and I'm hoping for the best.  The main page loads fine, but some other pages are returning errors.  I will wait until DNS propagation is further along, and then I'll check to see if the pages load.

I have been working on this during all of my downtime at school this week.  I am determined not to lose this weekend to website migration like I did last weekend.  I hope that with just a small amount of additional work that all three sites will be 100% up by the end of this weekend.