migrated blog to new hosting provider

So after moving my old hosting provider to a monthly renewal 12 months ago in preparation for moving it. I finally found a day to migrate it all over to a new provider on Saturday. I chose Mythic Beasts. A Cambridge based company that I have a few other domains hosted on and have been impressed by their plain talking sales, sensible pricing and proper technical support.

Their support pages suggests a “no downtime” workflow that involves copying their DNS entries for your new site to your existing hosting provider’s DNS record. So even though you do not know when the changes propagate through DNS servers both your existing provider and the new one’s all point to the same new server on your new provider’s site. Very straightforward.

I also discovered a cool WordPress plugin (Updraft Plus), that I’ve been using for backups for some time, has a very restore function that you can easily and quickly restore a backup to a new site. If I’d have known how easy and reliable this perhaps I would not have bothered exporting my site, and importing to a backup server. Just In Case.

messing up .htaccess in WordPress

If you change a hard link in WordPress it appears to edit your “.htaccess” file to fix it.

I’d had some custom lines to use php5 instead of php4. These got removed and my website stopped working.

Simple-Tweet is php5 only and this brought the whole lot down.

Problems uploading images to 1and1 hosts : Server error 500

I’ve had lots of problems with a 1and1 WordPress installation and uploading images within Marsedit.

Generally the image was uploaded correctly to the correct location on the host but gave a “Server Error 500” error message. This meant that Marsedit did not insert the link of the image and neither did it show in the Published Images Media Manager

There’s a quick workaround where I manually added the code to insert the image into the blog post. However, whereas the ability to write raw HTML is always handy, in this case it prevented me from finding a proper fix. I think I’ve had this problem for like a year. What a lazy sod!

The proper fix is to ensure that PHP is properly setup. Which is hard when you have little control over the host. So a quick fix is to add some lines for handling PHP script execution to your .htaccess file.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

– Download that file from your WordPress installation, if it exists.

– Add those line

– Upload the modified file.

Note you may need to change your FTP client’s settings to ensure you see dot/hidden files.

I came across this fix on the wordpress forums.

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