First of all, to forestall any misinterpretation of the title of this blog post: No, my plans for the Wongery haven't changed in any drastic way. I suppose there have been small refinements to my plans over time, but my goals haven't changed, even if some of the details have (such as exactly what subspaces I wanted in the Wongery). But even in terms of those details I don't think there have been any noteworthy changes lately.

No, the plan the title refers to is not my intentions and designs for the Wongery, but rather its hosting plan. Should I have picked a different title, one not as potentially misleading? Eh, yeah, probably; whatever.

I'd mentioned in a few posts in late December (most notably this one) that I had purchased a new hosting plan, to which I planned to migrate the Wongery (and a few other sites). The main reason for this was to separate it from my other sites. As I've also mentioned many times before (enough so that maybe it's becoming redundant to say I've mentioned it before every time I mention it), I have a lot of other websites besides the Wongery, even if this is the one I have the highest hopes for and that I spend the most time on (though still not nearly as much time as I should or would like to). All of them—no, wait, actually come to think of it all but one of them, my oldest domain that I've held onto for about thirty years now but haven't really done much with—are currently under a single hosting plan. This means they all have the same IP address, and moreover, because of the way the hosting is set up, that all but one of those domains actually redirect to subdomains of a single main domain. This wouldn't be a problem, except that, as I've also mentioned many times before (and maybe I just ought to stop altogether mentioning that I've mentioned things before, since it's really getting overdone and those who have read past blog posts already know these things have been mentioned before and to those who haven't it doesn't really matter), the Grandmaster Wongers prefer, for reasons beyond our own understanding, to keep our real identities a secret, and that becomes significantly more difficult when someone can just compare the IP addresses of the Wongery and my other websites to find out that they're owned by the same person. Especially since the domain name of the main domain that all the others redirect to includes, well, my actual legal name.

As I've mentioned before—okay, yeah, never mind, I guess I'll cut that out—this still isn't really a problem, for three reasons. First, that even after the hard launch, the Wongery is still an obscure and unvisited site. Second, because even if people do visit the Wongery, it's unlikely anyone's going to care enough about who runs it to make any serious effort to discover our identities. And third, that none of my other websites get much, if any, traffic either. They're all even more obscure and unvisited than the Wongery. AIMB (okay, I guess I'm not entirely cutting that out yet, but I'm at least reducing it to a cryptic acronym), I am very bad at self promotion. So even if someone did for some reason decide to compare the Wongery's IP address to those of other websites to look for matches, it's extremely unlikely they'd choose one of my other sites to compare it against. Still, even if at some level I know I'm stupidly worrying about nothing, I'm worrying about it anyway, because that's the kind of person I (unfortunately) am.

So, anyway. I bought a new hosting plan, and arranged for the Wongery and a few of my other sites to be migrated to it.

This did not go as planned.

I was told that the hosting company would take care of the migration, and that it would be done within twenty-four hours. It wasn't. Days later, it was still not completed, and I hadn't received any firm ETA of when it would be. Well, last week, it having been two months since the migration was supposed to be done, I figured it was long past time I contacted my hosting company and found out why it wasn't, and what could be done about it. Only I decided to search my email first to see if there was a message from them I'd missed on the matter.

And there was! They had in fact sent me a message on January 2 saying that the domain transfer was complete, and giving instructions for how I could test the sites at their new location before updating the DNS settings to complete the process.

Only there were two problems. One was, of course, that it had been long enough that I had done some work on the Wongery since then, and so the version migrated back in January would now be out of date. But, first, I could move over the altered files and databases easily enough. And second, well, okay, that one was my bad for not seeing their message sooner. So anyway, this really wasn't a big deal.

The much bigger deal was that, despite several communications with them during the migration process in which I repeatedly specified exactly which domains were to be migrated... they had migrated over all my domains, into a single subaccount with the same main domain as before, and all the other domains (including the Wongery) redirecting to subdomains thereof, exactly as it had been in my old hosting account. Which, of course, completely defeated the purpose of getting the new hosting plan in the first place.

I did contact the hosting company's support. Our chat began with their repeatedly telling me that the migration was complete and all I needed to do was update the DNS settings, but after we finally got beyond that to the actual issue, I was told that the representative I was chatting with had explained everything to the mythical admins and that I should "[k]indly expect the immediate assistance from our higher-ups regarding this via email". Given that this was five days ago and I have heard nothing further since, I gather that my hosting company has a somewhat different definition of "immediate" than I do, but in any case I'm not sure there's anything I want them to do at this point anyway; given how they completely botched the migration, I don't trust them to try it again. I'll just migrate the site over myself as I guess I should have done in the first place. The main thing stopping me was that, while I can easily migrate over the files and databases, I'm not sure how or if I can migrate over the email, but I may be able to figure it out (maybe all I have to do is copy over the files in the mail directory?), and even if I don't it's not like I have a lot of important emails sent to the Wongery that would be lost.

I'm not going to start the migration immediately, for two reasons. First, because I want to try migrating one of my other, less important (to me) domains first (complete with email) to make sure it goes right before tackling the Wongery. And second, because I am lazy. But sometime within the next few days (or at least within the next week), I will probably be migrating over the Wongery to my new hosting plan. And that means it may be going down for a day or two while the change to the DNS settings is being propagated, if that's the right word to use, which it probably isn't; I don't really understand computers.

Last week, my hosting company sent me a customer satisfaction survey. I have not responded to it yet. I think, however, that perhaps I will, and that my response will... not be entirely favorable.