What was supposed to be a smooth transition to our new server turned into an absolute shitstorm.
After so many sleepless months and weeks of preparing for this moment, the last few days felt like everything had finally fallen into place, and I could finally put whole thing behind me and get the much needed sleep and rest… and yet all my work leading up to this point combusted into flames. Everything you could possibly imagine go wrong with a migration happened. Both WordPress and the bloody plugin I had been using to connect our images from our new cloud literally broke.
That’s right, they actually broke.
Both did.
Although migrations all have their risks, usually they are a relatively smooth transition process. There might be a short period of downtime but most cases the site continues running as usual and nobody notices a thing. Unfortunately this time was not smooth sails (and it wouldn’t be the first time either [Flashback of first server transfer in 2010]. Then there was the factor of arranging the DNS stuff because of the domain transfer, and being all new to that, I didn’t properly understand how long it would actually take for it to do so (up to 24-48 hours). Nevertheless, we didn’t have much of a choice in terms of schedule. No matter what I could have done, it still would have been a lose/lose situation.
But what made this experience particularly stressful was the fact I encountered a number of obstacles that forced me back to the starting line over and over and over again from the moment we decided it was time to move. But that’s a story for another day. [SIGH] It is actually ridiculous how many obstacles I have run into, it is almost laughable.
It is an understatement that I am pretty upset about this mishap. This whole process has been extremely stressful and emotionally draining, and yet even after I put so much time and energy trying to get this all sorted out, we now have a massive clean up to do. It means all of our entries up until March 29, 2020, will require to be manually updated to restore both our galleries and featured images, and all the categories. This is particularly brutal when it comes down to restoring entries of our former writers who are no longer on our team (which has yet to be uploaded due to wordpress breaking on me). There’s a high chance that we may just have to leave them be, but I don’t really want to do that after I spent 2 weeks straight staying up all night to transfer all the images from our server into the cloud (which not only takes up a ton of space, but costs money too), and because various circumstances forced me into this position of scrambling to pull everything together at the last minute. This whole process has taken its toll on me, and feel very frustrated with how things played out. But there no use in regrets of things I could’ve, should’ve, or would’ve done, all there’s left is to move forward and just fix what has been broken.
So here is what we are going to do: Since Spring Season is starting this week, that will be our top priority. All of our entries from here on out shouldn’t have any problems with image upload and so on forth. It’s our older content up until this point that got screwed over. Obviously we don’t intend to leave them as they are, but it will be an incredibly time consuming process and a lot of work (re-importing it takes about 2 HRS per month, and we have to manually reapply the images to the galleries and correct the broken links) . So far I only have March 2020 imported, but the general idea is to focus on getting all of our Year 2020 Content fix this month, and then starting May we’ll start working out way down the timeline and prioritize the restoring the series’ entries that have garnered the most attention.
I am so sorry about how everything turned out. There is a lot of things that I will need to reflect on in the coming days as how we will choose to move forward in this matter. I know I have been asking for your patience for a few weeks now, and I’m going to have to ask you to please continue to be patient with us as we work to restore the Featured Images and Galleries. And after I figure things out how we will adjust in light of this unfortunate event, I will make an announcement of how we will proceed.
Once again, I am so sorry for the inconvenience.
