I was suspicious when the new hosting provider I've signed up with, Zume, offered "same-day migration" — not because I doubted their abilities, but because I doubted my current/prior host, Bluehost, would make it in any way easy to get everything off their servers and onto someone else's.
Turns out I was correct. Migrating a complete website setup like mine should be a case of going into cPanel and exporting something called a "cpmove" archive, which contains everything about the website: all its content, all its configuration, everything. Naturally, this is only something you can export yourself on a more expensive plan than I'm on, leading to multiple conversations with support people via a bloody chat interface, during which they consistently failed to understand what I was asking of them, despite me spelling it out to them very clearly and repeatedly.
The first time they ran the export, it seemingly worked correctly and created an archive, but said archive was, for some reason, faulty — and in the meantime, it had filled up my hosting account's storage space. So I then had to delete that and spend another couple of hours waiting for the person on the other end of the chat to run another export, only for them to first of all misunderstand the fact that I wanted to export two websites (this one and MoeGamer) not just this one, and then to completely miss the whole "cpmove" part.
Thankfully, the representative from Zume that I've been dealing with has been inordinately patient throughout this entire process, and has been keeping me informed on progress. It seems that he will be able to complete the migration without the "cpmove" part, it'll just take a bit longer to get things set up. I'm fine with this; I'm not in a rush to get it done, so I'd rather it be done right than done fast.
Self-hosting your own website certainly gives you more flexibility than being locked in to something like WordPress.com — to say nothing of the inherent risks of hosting your entire website on someone else's service — but man, it is a pain in the arse when something like this happens. And make no mistake: this is happening because Bluehost are deceptive fuckers who gave absolutely no indication when I signed up that their prices were going to increase this much after a year. We're talking an increase from about £60 to nearly £300. Absurd. And I bet they count on people just thinking "eh, I can't be bothered to fix it, so I'll just pay up".
Well, no. I'm not paying up. I'm looking forward to hitting the big red "CANCEL" button when all my sites are successfully transferred over, and here's hoping that Zume lasts at least a few years before enshittifying itself, too.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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