I’ve been with Godaddy for almost two months on an economy plan and I registered my first domain their too. You can’t say no to their $1.95 domain promo when you buy a non-domain product and their retail pricing option sealed the deal. You might think the reason for moving is their poor customer service, or their lack of Cpanel, or a sluggish load time but, no. It wasn’t that.

Godaddy is a good host, for beginners. 10 G of storage and 300 G of bandwith per month is more than enough for startup blogs. Load time is at par with those hosted on Bluehost and Hostmonster too. The lack of Cpanel was never an issue then cause I don’t even know what a Cpanel is until I went to Holdfire. They don’t have live online support though. That’s a bummer for international subscribers. We have to wait for a day for our emailed queries were responded.

5 days ago, I finally decided to bid farewell to Godaddy, and move to a new host. I would not say my new host, Holdfire, is better . In fact, has lesser storage space (4 G) and bandwith (125 G). The catch is on the unlimited MySQL Database, unlimited subdomains, unlimited parked domains and 5 (yes 5!) add-on domains. All these and more costs only $45 dollars a year. However, since I used the Holdfire promotional code, HOSTIGG (all caps), I got a year’s hosting only for $20!

Since I go with the idea that “a penny saved, is a penny earned” and that a good entrepreneur always invests his savings, I invested $6.5 to register a new domain and start my own social network. It’s not like I’m gonna compete with Facebook, Friendster (Freindster, Frienster, Freinster. heheh just optimizing keywords) and Myspace. I’m making one for our city, the Amish-like community where I live. I called it MaasinSii a combination of its name and the famous local expression, “sii” (wee don’t have any translation for this). I’m gonna tell you more about it later on.

The transfer of hosts has not been easy. I just kept gazing at my monitor, clueless of what to do next. Thanks to Google search that provided a ray of light into database backup and restoration, DNS propagation, FTP configuration and shell commands, and ultimately, database migration. I could have opted to simply go to the Manage Tab in Wordpress and hit Export but there are a lot more data than just posts, comments, and custom fields that should be migrated. I needed my Statpress Stats, Popularity Contest stats and the Pageviews too.

My first look at the database using phpMyAdmin sent shivers to my spine. It was a whole new world for me. I never seen such commands before. I managed to do the SQL export based on my manual then had 2 copies of it in my hard drive then proceeded to changing my name servers. I was prepared to call it a day already since per instruction, it would take 24 hours of more for the new IP to propagate on the net but after 5 minutes, the ping already showed a new set of IP details.

My dilemma didn’t end there. Some of my plug-ins weren’t working and my custom fields are jumbled up. Apparently, my database backup was corrupted and I can’t do something about it cause I already deleted the old one. I spent 2 days manually fixing it and just as I finished, Wordpress 2.5 arrived. I was back to the backing up databases, backing up files, deleting old installations and turning my site back on again. This time, I did it with lesser sweat.

What can’t kill you only makes you stronger, according to old adage. In my case, it also made me wiser too. With a little bit of patience, a creative way of searching Google and an analytical mind open for new inputs, I can and will, survive cyberspace!