Greetings!
Last week was a little tough around here. We moved over 100 web sites to a dedicated server, on the advice of the hosting company. Several lessons were learned.
When I say "we moved," of course, I mean they moved. If we had done it, one by one, the process would have been essentially the same, but would have taken much longer. When I asked the hosting company to make the move, they used a script and everything moved within a few hours of when they started.
And then we had three days of chasing problems and replicating work.
First lesson: This turned out to be one more example of one of my core beliefs - no one's paying attention. :-)
Ironically, I released a video about this two weeks ago on the
Relax Focus Succeed YouTube channel. See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ny18tAHAc. Two people reported minor problems across 130 web sites. And those problems disappeared after DNS was consistently pointing to the new location.
The biggest problem we had took an entire of Nai's time to straighten out. But no one apparently noticed.
Second lesson: Sometimes you get lucky. We had previously moved the major web sites (the money makers), so they were very stable and not affected by this whole movement of additional web sites.
But, that leads to an odd lesson.
Third lesson: Sometimes great advice doesn't work exactly as expected. One of my favorite books and authors is Great by Choice by Jim Collins. And one of the great pieces of advice in that book is: Shoot Bullets, Then Cannonballs. The basic idea is to try little things before you make the big move.
We basically thought we'd done this. Rather than move all the sites at once, we moved one site. It was super smooth. Then we moved another. Perfect. Then we moved an important site. Flawless. Then another important site. Also good.
At that point, we thought we'd learned how these transitions went. We only had good experiences. We'd shot enough "bullets" to feel confident that it was time to shoot the cannonball.
On Day Two, I entered a new service request to ask someone to make sure that the new server had enough memory and enough processor power. I was concerned that we might overload the server. On Day Three, every site disappeared as the server had to be rebooted because it had run out of memory.
I'm not sure there's a lesson in that except, "Think of everything, even before it occurs to you."
In the end, the machine has enough memory and we did allocate enough resources. But those calculations were all based on the machine as it is today (after the move). During the move, it needed lots of extra resources as it moved thousands of directories and millions of files.
So, in the end, moving the sites one at a time would have essentially guaranteed zero downtime because the server would never have become overwhelmed moving one site at a time.
. . . And that brings us to another fundamental rule for success: Slow Down, Get More Done.
Let's hope this week is blissfully uneventful.
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Calendar Updates - Send them to me!
I think I have most of the industry events listed through the end of 2022, but please send me any updates you have. Email karlp@smallbizthoughts.com
And as you hear about events in 2023, please send those as well. It's never to late to get them on the calendar.
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The summer non-roadshow trip to Scotland and the UK is approaching fast. If you are interested in getting together, having dinner, and networking, make sure you're on my list. Just send me an email with "Scotland" or "UK" in the subject line.
Right now I am scheduled to land in Edinburgh on August 5th. I'm going to travel to Falkirk, Glasgow, and Manchester for sure. I don't currently have a ticket to get back home, but I fully intend to get home at some point. I'm open to adventures.
Email karlp@smallbizthoughts.com
Note: Do NOT send me notes on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Stitch, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Whatsapp, WeChat, Reddit, Teams, Telegram, HouseParty, Tumbler, or anything that's not . . .
Email karlp@smallbizthoughts.com
If you don't get a response in a reasonable amount of time, resend with a note that says, "I'm putting this on the top of your inbox."
I know this irritates some people, but I have thousands of unread messages in the biggies (Facebook and LinkedIn). These have become 97% spam and I just don't look at them.
My rule for this is very simple: I'm going to be using email for my email.
I might (I do) get behind, but I really do try to answer all my legit email.
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