Welcome to our new home. This is the first post; in fact our first experiment in blogging. After many years of a broken website and suffering from lack lustre hosting services we have finally summoned up the courage to move to a new hosting provider here on Mythic Beasts.
It has taken us about a month to get this far; moving domains, emails, and setting up a new website using WordPress. Most of that time has been getting to grips with WordPress.
To continue with the moving house metaphor; there’s still a lot of stuff still in boxes, some of the furniture might have ended up in the wrong rooms, and there’s probably some re-decorating to be done. It is a work in progress but it is habitable and all the services appear to work.
The actual move was easier and more straightforward than imagined. By following the steps in the guidance provided by Mythic Beasts moving the domains and email took no more than a couple of days and without downtime or loss of service. There was one hiccough resulting from my haste to get things moving and that would have resolved itself given time but was resolved with the excellent support from Mythic Beasts. As a bonus there was an immediate cost saving renewing the domains with Mythic Beasts.
Old emails could have been moved from the old provider to the Mythic Beasts servers however the decision was taken not to. The reason being that although retaining access to old emails was desirable, the nature of the emails meant that online access wasn’t necessary. To this end inboxes were cleaned by hand before being archived and made available from a local offline store through the Thunderbird mail client. The benefit to this approach is that it avoids consuming hosting space, storing emails that are never read again.
Installing WordPress was even easier; the Mythic Beasts’ control panel takes care of all but the handful of decisions to be made, such as website title etc. And as advertised, takes a minute, or probably less, once the install button has been clicked. As always with websites, design and content are the things that take the most time.
The next steps are; a lot of experimentation, to refine and add to the content on the website and to develop better blogging skills.