Dilemma

[bladespark]

I've thought for some time about leaving topcities.

On the one hand... it's been very reliable, and has plenty of space/bandwidth, etc. There isn't actually anything wrong with it, and I can count the number of times it's been down in the last five years on my fingers and have plenty left over.

On the other, it's not really set up ideally for my costume site. I'd like to have a place with a few more features, things like the ability to host my own forum instead of mooching off of Aurora, for example. And having the costume site have it's own web address. My own e-mail, me@me.com kinda thing. An address that's /really/ me.com and not me.topcities.com. Alll that good stuff.

But the real problem is that moving would break literally thousands of links. Old lj posts, tutorials on people's forums, discussions of fursuits and costumes and Windstones, suddenly they would all no longer have working photos in them! Because for years I've just tossed anything I needed to show up on my site and linked it directly. And I HATE when people have tutorials and discussions with broken pictures. The really old ones wouldn't bug me much, but the sheer pain of going through all my recent project show-off posts and updating with new pictures... ugh.

Maybe, if I find the ideal place to move to, I'll pay for both sites and just mirror instead. Use the topcities for personal stuff and random photo hosting. It's not like I can't afford a second round of $6 a month. That's not exactly going to break the bank here. I already pay more than that in advertising costs, and the benefits of the direct link to the costume site at sparkcostumes.com rather than bladespark.topcities.com/costume would almost be worth it all by itself.

Dunno, I'll have to think on it some more. Maybe after JJ's had his new site up and running for a bit, he can report on how that hosting is. It has all the fetures I really want, and is in the right price range...

Comments

[catwoman69y2k.livejournal.com]

To me, its worth it to get a brand new page and start all over again. Its time consuming yes, but you can have all your content moved over. I backed up all my html pages and such onto my dreamweaver and it made it easy to transfer over to the new server.

Even if you dont do things that way, its still worth your while. Heck, if you need a lackey to help you do this, Im your girl. :)

-Kat

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

It's not the moving, that's easy. A few hours and an FTP program, it's done.

It's the mess left behind! My old site is gone! Suddenly nothing I've linked to from anywhere else is there anymore. None of the pictures of minis, Windstones, or fursuits here on my lj, for example, will work. They'll all 404 error when somebody tries to view them, because they address of that picture would be sparkcostumes.com/picture instead of bladespark.topcities.com/pciture

That's the problem.

[euphoriel.livejournal.com]

Do you know if it is possible to add redirects on topcities? I don't mean just a page that says "Hey, I moved, go here!" but rather something that actually redirects the browser there for the requested resource? If so, you could move it all to your content and it would still be accessible at both addresses. I'm sure there's an even better way to do this, I just don't know that it is myself.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Uh... in order to fix the lj/forum photo problem, that would require me redirecting every single one of several thousand jpg files on my site. Even were it possible, I don't think I'd want to do this.

And I'm pretty sure it's not possible.

[euphoriel.livejournal.com]

I was thinking something that can do the entire site in a few lines, using .htaccess to create a 301 redirect for "bladespark.topcities.com/costume" to whatever domain you want, but it does appear that topcities probably doesn't allow that. I can't even upload a .htaccess file to them via ftp or create one through their site manager, though if you have a paid account it may be possible. Good luck -- there is a reason I technically still have a tripod account, so I know how this goes. :)