Moved 23 domains yesterday...
I started an e-commerce website for my new shop selling my homemade lip balms, and I started the site in a sub directory of my hosting account (which is called public_html) like all of my other sites. However, in order to get the SSL certificate (secure site) I had to make that domain the primary domain for the account. The primary domain by default lives directly in the public_html directory... which means that the subfolders of the domain are mixed in with the folders that contain all of my other domains...and also, all of my other domains' content would show up as subfolders of my shop! What a messy nightmare!
So I kept the shop in a subfolder and used something called mod_rewrite in a file called .htaccess to redirect things so it still worked. Except it didn't...several things were wonky. Coupons didn't work, gift certificates were broken, a few things weren't working right with some of my payment modules... And out turned out the mod_rewrite was the problem.
So I decided to split it into two hosting accounts, one for the shop and one for the rest. The obvious thing would be to move the shop to the new account, but it turns out that they won't transfer the SSL certificate (which costs money) to another account. That meant that I had to move all three other domains to the new account.
So I zipped up all the folders, backed up all the databases, downloaded all the backups to my home computer and started rebuilding. 23 domains. 17 mySQL databases. 10 installations of Textpattern, 4 Gallery installations (HUGE downloads/uploads) and more... Everything had hardcoded file paths that needed to be updated, configuration files that needed to be changed, database information that needed to be adjusted to the new account's info...
It was so much work. It took hours and hours. Some of my databases were too large to import into the new account and so I spent at least an hour on the phone with tech support... Then when all of that was in place it was time to un-assign the domain names from the old account what assign them to the new account. The moment of truth... Would the sites work? Would they be broken? Misconfigured? Did I miss a line somewhere that needed to be changed?
Most of them went smoothly. A few had works where I didn't realize a path was hardcoded into a page or a template file, etc., but I got everything working in the end except for two domains that were "stuck" and wouldn't assign to the new account. But it was 4am and I decided to sleep on it and see if it worked in the morning.
It didn't. Back on the phone with tech support. It turns out the issue was that the domains were about to be renewed and so they were kind of locked. They said they fixed it, but when I got off the phone and tried assigning them again, they still didn't work. So that is where it stands now. I put in a support ticket...now we wait.
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