About a month ago we decided that we needed to get a new host service for our website.
We had been having trouble with the host for a couple of weeks resulting in website outages and other problems, and when we asked for support we didn't get any at all.
The straw that broke the camels back was with the last outage when the host hadn't done a back up, and we lost all the posts for the previous week. Luckily, by working with the post's authors we managed to reinstate most of them.
We did some investigations, and a couple of weeks ago decided to go with a new hosting servive based in Newcastle.
Normally transferring the website to a new host should be a reasonably simple process. Doug K did some website tidying up beforehand. The actual transfer process went fairly well, the website looked good with good performance and no loss of functionality.
Howver, after the transfer we started getting lots of error messages which indicated a compatability failure between the website coding/modules and the PHP software used by the host to help run the website. It didn't have much of an impact on functionality and performance, but it had the potential to cause major problems and possibly a website crash if not fixed, so we had to do something about it.
But finding the problem was like the proverbial "needle in a haystack".
Doug K spent many many frustrating hours trying to identify the problem. He spent a huge amount of time on it and from some of the emails I received I could see he was working late into the night at times.
Doug eventually found the problem, it was an "errant bit of code in a sub-module that stretched over three lines". The "bug finding" software that Doug used didn't find it, in the end Doug found it after reviewing many thousands of lines of code.
As part of this finding the bug Doug also upgraded modules which will make it much easier in the future for when we have to upgrade the underlying website software.
So Doug, THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH. You spent many many hours on this host transfer, and I, and I'm sure all website users, appreciate the huge effort you put into it. It was certainly service above and beyond the call of duty.
