I’ve spent most of the weekend sorting out some of the websites I host. I’ve got lost in a fog of DNS settings, droplets and backups. It’s a good job that the weather has been rubbish this weekend, as I didn’t have the urge to wander about anywhere. It was either fixing websites or getting soaked in heavy downpours of rain.
When I first set up my sites, I allocated them plenty of storage space, so they would have room to grow, if needed. This turned out to be a massive over-compensations, and the hosting charges were way above what they should have been. My job over the weekend has been to get three hosting packages or ‘droplets’ down from 160Gb each to something more manageable and affordable.
Taking backups of the content and systems that are part of a WordPress site is not an easy job, and has taken a lot of patience to slowly work through each one, create a new droplet, and then import the files before making it live again.
I’m not a web developer, so typically I do things by trial and error. I’ve probably made loads more mistakes, and could be running things much more efficiently. So, I got two of the three sites back up and running, but the third is proving to be a problem, given the size of the backup file. I’ve taken a backup of my original site, so I can always return to that, but I really would like to get it working by the end of this evening. For the satisfaction of completing the task, I suppose.
While I was at it, I’ve put together a basic WordPress site for Radio Lear. This is where I should be spending my time and energy. Being creative rather than fixing things. Though I do find fixing stuff like websites quite relaxing. The functional necessity of following a process, and working out how PHP or MySQL should work, keeps my brain ticking over. I doubt I could do this for a living, though. I’m far too disorganised.
It’s been a good distraction from the news. I don’t think I could have absorbed any more of the Tory psychodrama. Fixing a website is much better than pondering the thought that the government is imploding, and the country is being ruined. Thank heavens for rainy days and a reasonable internet connection.
