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!