
As of this moment, my website is being hosted on a new service provider. It has taken me ten days to fully implement the migration, delayed primarily by the release and transfer of my domain name by my previous provider. For most websites, such a migration is not a big deal. Mine, with a twenty-year repository of daily photos, however, is considered quite large (40GB). Moving files of this size proved more than most common tools could handle and often triggered bandwidth or time-out limits on the hosting server. It is difficult to convey the frustration of having a transfer or backup fail after 20 hours of operation, with no clues as to why. I am a hardware engineer by training, and my software skills are modest at best. Suffice it to say that I’m not very comfortable editing PHP files, searching for and replacing old URLs with new ones in my SQL database, or re-indexing the Permalinks on my site. AI proved a helpful guide, but also offered some very questionable recommendations. I hope and trust that I will never have to undertake such a migration ever again.

