So the dust seems to have settled on a rather tricky day yesterday.

It started with a cautionary email to warn me that Head Rambles was receiving a lot of traffic and that this was interfering with other sites on the shared webspace.  I had been meaning to move it to its own area anyway so this came as no surprise.

Head Rambles is effectively hosted on three servers – mail, web and database.  The move was simply a matter of moving the files on the web server to a new area.

Simple?

No.

Copying across the files should have worked, as all references to the database should retain their integrity, which they did.  However, Word Press and its ancillary plug-ins isn’t quite so flexible.  It transpired that there were quite a few references in the database tables to absolute paths.

A typical entry in a record could be something along the lines of the following:

/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/115124/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/

However, moving the site files from webspace 115124 to webspace 120566 could have implications for the site, as the record would then have to read

/usr/local/pxm/vhosts/120566/webspace/httpdocs/headrambles/wp-content/

That aside, the site should have functioned normally, with maybe a loss of functionality in a couple of plug-ins.

It didn’t.

For some reason, the site refused to function in its new home.  It was slow, to put it mildly, and while I was desperately trying to find the cause of this, I got another mail from the people in Blacknight. 

I must point out here, that I had been trying to sort the problem out on my own.  Blacknight had obviously been monitoring both Twitter (where there were a few caustic comments about the site being down) and the site itself, as they then stepped in and moved the whole site to a new server.

Anyway, the site ran perfectly in its new location (apart from the few changes that had to be made to the database), and we never did discover the cause of the original problem.

I cannot sing the prises of Blacknight highly enough.  They saw a problem.  They solved it.  As they are a large company, they presumably have a fairly healthy workload, yet they dropped all to help a client in trouble, even though I had not wanted to bother them.

So – a huge thanks to Niall, Nils and especially Paul.  And of course to Michele for running the best hosting company in the business.