Well...that was frustrating. And, like most things in my life, it was sprinkled with just the right amount of karma and irony.
If you check this site from time to time, you may have noticed it was offline for the past week. I would love to go on a long rant, describing all the ways that some 3rd party wronged me. (Un)Fortunately, I don't have that luxury.
After being one of the millions ranting about how much GoDaddy sucks, I had moved all but this domain over to Hover.com. I don't normally change businesses based on public perception, but the elephant-shooting CEO and the tastless ads finally got to me.
I didn't move thatbookkeeper.com for a while because I was worried about downtime. I heard horror stories about how difficult GoDaddy could be when trying to leave.
After a random glitch took some of my posts offline last week, I decided to make the move. I was already fixing things on the site, so another day or two in limbo wouldn't be so bad.
This is where the karma and/or irony comes into play.
As evidenced by the week-long downtime, things went as I worried they would. However, it was mostly my fault. Squarespace and Hover both have great tutorials on how to move things over from GoDaddy. And, had I followed those steps perfectly, and been a bit more patient, it would have been painless.
Instead, I missed a step with my nameservers. And, when emailing for support, I did it in the wrong order. I emailed Squarespace first. They wouldn't know which nameservers Hover used, so they wouldn't know that they were wrong.
A couple days later, I emailed Hover. They spotted the error right away. Then, I just got impatient. I think one site mentioned the possibility of it taking 24 hours to sort itself out. So, of course, I took that as "24 hours max, no exceptions". I emailed both Hover and Squarespace again. They couldn't see any problems, mostly because nothing was wrong.
Finally, today, after a couple extra days, it's all up and running smoothly again.
On a related note, all that fun caused my email to stop working. So, if you tried to email me this week...sorry. That's working now.
The Lessons
1.Know Your Strengths I really want to be that guy that knows everything, especially when it comes to tech. In the same way, because I have an obscenely large music collection, I want to be able to pick up a guitar and belt out the perfect solo. That's just not realistic. Because I assumed I could do this without any help, it caused the site (and my email) to stop working for a week.
If you notice certain parts of your business are struggling because you don't have the proper skills, consider outsourcing those things to someone who does.
2.Don't Jump Into New Projects Without Planning Ahead
I am swamped right now. I've got piles of paper on my desk that could potentially bury me alive if they were to fall over. I don't have time to mess around with DNS settings. One of my many flaws/gifts is an insatiable love to tinker in my downtime. I get bored at 11:00pm and decide to move my domain or redo my task management system.
Think long and hard before jumping into a new project. Make sure you have the time. And, by time, I mean the actual time it will take. To calculate that, take the time you think it'll take, and multiply that by at least 3. If you don't have that kind of free time right now, write it down and come back to it when you do.
I hope my pain serves as a warning to others.
Also, a big thanks to the folks at Squarespace and Hover. They were awesome every step of the way. If you ever need to buy a domain, or build a new site, these are the people to go to.