The Trials of Shifting Webhost

Last week I took part in the shifting of A Teaspoon and an Open Mind from one web host to HostForWeb. I struck only two major problems.

1/ The backup format for MySQL databases which HostForWeb and the old web host used were completely different. The old host generated a gzipped tar of FRM, MYD, and MYI files, while HostForWeb expects a file in some format I didn't recognise. Fortunately I've struck a similar problem before, so I generated a file full of SQL queries and away I went.

2/ I discovered that if you tar and gz a directory structure in Windows XP, then decompress it again on Linux, all the directories are created without the executable attribute (On UNIX systems, directories must be set executable so you can use them, while Windows doesn't even have an executable attribute). I wrote a perl script to run through all the directories and set the executable bit.

Hopefully we won't need to do that again soon.