This post will be of interest to anyone who owns a website domain and/or publishes a blog. In a previous post, I mentioned how my e-mail host, GoDaddy increased my annual hosting fee by several hundred percent. They also told me they weren’t going to support my current e-mail platform going forward. Wow, charging me more and telling me I won’t get any new features nor support? Sounds like a great deal! I have now fully transferred over my e-mail hosting to another company, which doesn’t charge me a cent. Over the last week, I moved well over five thousand e-mail messages from the old GoDaddy server to the new one. Just ten minutes ago, I changed over the MX records. MX records tell e-mail servers where to send messages for a particular address. Think about that card you fill out at the post office when you move. It let’s the post office know that all mail going to your old address should be forwarded to your new address. On the Internet, these changes can take as much as 48 hours to propagate through the system. It’s possible some messages will still wind up at the old server but that’s ok. If all goes well, in two days I’ll be able to cancel my e-mail hosting at GoDaddy and get a refund.
Coincidentally, over the weekend, I also had to help a friend with his own GoDaddy issue. My friend, who I will refer to as DeShawn, hosted a blog on GoDaddy using their horrendous Quick Blogcast platform. His blog means a lot to him and it has been a great way for him to express his thoughts. The blog also contained a lot of photos which he hosted on their platform. GoDaddy is retiring the Quick Blogcast platform this week but he only got the notice late last week. While DeShawn is an extremely smart man with PhD and MD degrees, blogging platforms and hosting details are not things he is an expert in. He called me to help him rescue his blog and all his content. He needed my help because GoDaddy was completely useless in assisting him transfer his content to another blogging platform. What little advice he was given was basically wrong. It took some trial and error but I was able to move DeShawn’s entire blog, including all his posts and his content from GoDaddy’s servers to a new WordPress blog.
DeShawn’s situation taught me a valuable lesson about Internet content. Be very wary of using proprietary systems to generate content for your blog or website. The company that owns that proprietary system can leave you at their mercy based on a whim, just like what happened to DeShawn. Always have an out. If you can’t export your blog, posts, images, videos, messages, e-mails or whatever in a reasonable amount of time, then you might have a problem. You have to be prepared that you’ll need to move all that content in just a few days.
As a final note, if anyone was thinking about e-mailing me, there’s a slight chance things might go a bit wonky so if you don’t hear from me, send me the message again.