Last weekend I decided to move two of my websites to a new hosting service. I’d been considering it for some time, but one of them was a WordPress site and I was a little apprehensive about making the change, since I experienced great difficulty moving a client’s WordPress site in the past. I was even more nervous because I realized I needed to upgrade to WP 2.7 to make the transition go more smoothly, and I’d had difficulty with that before as well. I am delighted to say that both the upgrade and the transfer went off without a hitch!

I expected no problems moving the other site, a standard html website. After all, I’d moved dozens of sites before! Much to my dismay, on Sunday, we stopped receiving email. It wasn’t going to the old server, or to the new one. I contacted the new web host and they assured me not to worry, that it could take 24-72 hours to resolve. It seemed odd that we would still be receiving email on the old server, but agreed to be patient. Monday, I contacted them again, same thing. By this time I was really getting anxious, so I decided to Google the problem and found someone who had blogged about the exact same experience last summer. I left her a comment asking how long it took before the problem was solved, and she emailed me to let me know that the host had had to fix something on their end, and encouraged me to follow up with them. I did so on Tuesday morning, wording my question a little differently, and was happy to have my email restored almost immediately.

This experience taught me a few things:

• Just because you expect something to be difficult, doesn’t mean it will be.
• Just because you expect something to go smoothly, doesn’t mean it will.
• If an answer doesn’t sound right, try rewording your question.

As far as I know, there were no serious implications of the temporary email outage, as I was able to send emails and to provide clients with an alternate way of reaching me. And in addition to the lessons listed above, it led me to a remarkable learning opportunity. As it turns out, the person whose blog I stumbled upon in my search for an answer was Suzanne Franco, one of the two people who tied for first place in Blogging Idol 2, and right now she is offering free registration in her Blogging for Bucks Bootcamp, which normally costs $297.00. I would not have known about this if I hadn’t had the problem with my email! This is one of those things that makes you say hmmm…