Changing Hosts for our Website

This weekend we are moving the whole website to a new internet host, Rackspace, which promises no downtime and 24/7 support. I have been really impressed with them so far.

We have tested the new site using the numerical URL (http://72.3.135.168) and it seems to be working, thanks to some help from a terrific programmer, Katie Grogan, who has helped me with my shopping cart over the years. Now we just have to swap out the numbers for the name throughout the site, and change the nameservers at the registrar, and hopefully it will be a smooth transition. We are doing it on Friday afternoon, to give us the weekend to fix anything that comes up.

This became necessary when we had 3 full days of time OFF LINE in March due to our current host, 1and1, which is terrible and I don't recommend to anyone. The only thing I can say about it is that it was cheap, but we have outgrown it. Rackspace is more than we really need, but I couldn't find a hosting provider in between in terms of price that could give me the uptime and service responsiveness that I need in order to sleep at night. So hopefully it will be a quiet weekend with no news to report as everything will go smoothly!

New napkin colors

We have new wedding napkin colors! Finally, an aqua is back! I was so excited to get the two new albums with new colors. Aqua, Marine (turquoise, basically), Mango, Magenta, Bay (a medium blue)--all brand new colors. Peach is not in any current album but they are still filling my orders for it, so we will see if it is soon discontinued. Below is our new bay color.

Survived the Move

Well we moved our family and thus this business from New Jersey to Maryland due to my husband's promotion to an inside-the-beltway job with the federal government. Thanks to my Cingular wireless on my handheld computer, I was able to keep up with my email and orders from Antonia Rose Printing for the week we were without high speed internet access. The wedding season has begun and orders are starting to pick up, especially for the fan programs. Our new house is in a rural part of Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay and we have a big yard for the kids. Best of all, there are other kids their age just down the road, no small thing when you are out in the country.

The latest excitement was when our website was down all day yesterday due to a server hardware problem. I was very unhappy that my host, 1and1.com, did not move it to a backup server but just left us offline for 10 hours until it was fixed. That was not a happy day! But we are good to go now.

Wedding Fan Programs still hot for 2007

Our wedding fan programs are still our hottest program format for the 2007 wedding season, with more photo ones being sold this year.

We are seeing a lot of creativity with color, too. On the photo wedding fan programs you can print the text in two different colors, so between the colors and the fonts you can really make a unique design.

Our prices are still below retail, though we have to limit it to one free proof now. The proofs are taking up to 3 days to turnaround, so many people don't have time for more than one proof anyway, not a big change for most customers.