What a week! For the second time in a month, my Web host crashed our site. The first time, both our site and email were down for two days. The second time, it was just our email that went AWOL for a day. When things like this happen on a weekend, nobody seems to be available to fix things.
For those of you who are thinking that I should've had backups ready - I did! I had used HTTrack to back up my site for viewing on my laptop when I was in an area with no internet service available. So, I had access to all my non-templated content.
On Saturday night, I went ahead and purchased hosting space from FutureQuest. I had been eyeballing them for about three years. The biggest advantage to this host (other than the redundant backup systems) is that they DO NOT host any adult sites. That means that it's a little less likely that your email will get blocked due to the SPAMMING activities of others.
By Sunday morning, I had access to begin development of the 'new' site. Since it's been about 5 years since I did any Web development, I spent about 12 hours creating the main page, property search pages, and contact information pages. I started off my creation spree with Nvu. When I figured out that I'd have to jump through a couple of extra hoops to upload the site via Nvu, I dusted off the Dreamweaver MX04 that I had purchased a couple of years back.
There I was, three or four pages created and many more to go. I needed to add a KW logo to the site. Rats - the one I wanted to use wasn't on my hard drive. At least I could download it from the KW intranet. As I was navigating through the download area, I ran across some free (for KW agents) Web site kits. I downloaded them all and started looking through them. When I showed them to my wife (also an agent), she actually liked the same site kit that I liked!
All I had to do was add our photo, update information about us, and create the links for the public to search the three MLSs that I have membership in. This took up about half the day on Monday. Although there were some dead-end links, the site was basically up and ready! Since I had previously had problems with spambots filling out forms on the last host, I'm hiring a local company, Simply Web Services, to do some tweaking to my forms and my site's SQL databases.
I almost forgot, I received a call from a technician at my previous Web host on Tuesday (that's right - 3 days after the problem occurred). I let him know that I had solved the issue - I had already switched hosts.
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