So I woke up this morning to an email from alert reader Michael Ludgate notifying me that when he tried to access any page on my site, he got the following message:

WordPress database error: [Can't create/write to file '/tmp/mysqltmp/#sql_11b6_0.MYI' (Errcode: 2)]


“Oh, joy,” I thought to myself as I began investigating. I knew that the problem could not have been caused by anything I did. First, my most recent update to the site was back on April 2, that was just a content posting, and I was 100% certain my site had been alive and well much more recently than that. Second, I don’t even have shell access, so I couldn’t make a file in /tmp/… disappear if I tried. That meant the problem had to be with my ISP, and was probably outside my control.

After poking around for a little while in the vain hope that if I messed with stuff the tmp file would spontaneously regenerate, I sent a missive off to tech support. The auto-responder helpfully told me that I could expect to wait 24 - 48 hours for a response. Even if this is just a blog, that’s too much downtime. So I decided a phone call was in order.

A baffled tech support rep suggested I uninstall and reinstall WordPress. When I pushed him on how this problem happened to begin with, the tech support rep backpedalled a little and said he’d escalate the issue. I now had an incident number for tracking purposes, and a promise that “someone would get back to me.”

At this point I evaluated my options.

I’ve been growing annoyed with godaddy.com anyway. Every time I log into my admin account, they try to upsell me. They don’t let me have shell access. They don’t support Ruby on Rails well - or not as well as I would like. I find their admin UI clunky. These are little annoyances; they’re not enough to push me to change hosts. But now that I had a down site and no ETA for a fix, I decided that changing hosts was actually the path of least resistance.

So my adventures began. I bought 3 months of hosting on A2hosting.com, a host I’d been contemplating for RoR hosting anyway. I managed to get a backup of my content from my godaddy.com site. (Note to self: I need to revisit my blog backup strategy. I happened to get lucky today - the catastrophic error that made my site unusable mercifully did not prevent me from exporting the data. But that was sheer luck. My previous backup was a couple months old. But I digress.)

I then put up a “pardon the mess” notification on both the old and new sites and changed my DNS entries to point to the DNS servers at the new location on A2. And I installed WordPress on the new site.

I had to wait for the DNS changes to propagate before I could do more because every attempt to log into the WordPress admin interface in the new location redirected me to the old site. Fortunately, I had to go to an appointment anyway. By the time I got back I could see the new IP address when I pinged testobsessed.com.

I then began migrating the content. That meant restoring the content from the SQL backup through a MySQL admin interface, upgrading the tables, panicking when it looked like the schema wasn’t going to upgrade cleanly, and finally breathing a sigh of relief when I saw the old content in the new site.

But wait! There was still more to do. I uploaded the theme files and other resources (including images and pdfs and such). I fixed the permalink settings. I tested. I fixed glitches. I tested again. I swore.

And finally I got the old site up on a new host.

This is, quite frankly, NOT how I expected to spend my day. I was supposed to be doing paperwork - invoices, expense reports, contracts, that sort of thing. This was a geekier, and possibly more exciting way to spend my day, but it was not at all what I had planned. And in my haste it is certainly possible that I missed some detail.

I think everything is working now. Please let me know if you find anything strange - missing content, broken links, whatever. (No, I don’t have a full set of automated regression tests to cover every link I publish. I’ve considered it, but the cost of maintaining such a suite of tests seems a little high for a non-revenue-generating blog.)

And that escalated trouble ticket filed with godaddy? Still not handled. I’m not particularly surprised. My suspicion is that the problem I encountered is somehow related to the fact that I had not migrated my WordPress to their whiz-bang new Hosting Connection application management console thingy. That first tech support rep was probably right: I could have solved my problem by uninstalling and re-installing WordPress.

But I don’t think that would have been any easier than moving hosts - the only saved step would have been the DNS change. And I’m happier having migrated. And - as an extra bonus - the site even seems to be responding a little zippier.

This little digression will probably boost another back-burner project to the foreground: I’ve been meaning to change the way I manage my main company site. Other alert readers have pointed out to me that my calendar at qualitytree.com is more than a year out of date. It’s embarrassing. But I haven’t fixed it because I publish that site using an obscure little Windows-based CMS. Since I’ve gone all-Mac, updating qualitytree.com means I have to boot up my old Windows laptop, and I hate doing that.

I’m going to see how things go with the new host for a while before migrating everything. But it looks like I’ll be migrating my other website sooner rather than later.

And now I’d better start on that paperwork I meant to take care of today.