User:Anno1404/mystory

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This is my story of what happened when I tried to transfer dead-rising.wiki.com to a shared hosting server, dead-rising-wikia.com.

First $7 spent
I decided to leave wikia and transfer dead-rising.wikia.com.

I already had a shared hosting site on godaddy, with one wiki, which I was paying $80 a year.

On November 3rd I paid $7 to create a new wiki domain name, dead-rising-wiki.com.

Companies always make payment extremely easy. Technical support is always much, much more difficult.

Godaddy has a nice button which allows a website owner to create a new mediawiki. I created a new mediawiki site.

Easy so far. I was really excited.

Transferring wikis is impossible
Then came the impossible part. Transferring wikis is extremely difficult for the computer illiterate. The instructions on mediawiki are made only for editors who are fluent in computer languages. I have spend years trying to dumb down those instructions, but many pages are simply incomprehensible to most people.

From November 3rd to November 15th I spent trying to get wikidump to work. An editor was helpful and extremely patient, but I was unable to get the PERL to work on my wiki.

Mdiawiki's technical support is lacking
I spent a couple of weeks trying to get simple, straight forward questions answered.

Another problem with mediawiki is the technical support is sometimes hard to come by. I still have questions posted on mediawiki and mwusers.com which were never answered. My IRC questions were never answered day after day after day. Mailing list and talk page questions were left unanswered.

As a computer illiterate, the secret I have found is finding a mentor patient enough to put up with my stupid questions, but this takes a lot of time.

First $70 spent: Total thus far $77

 * Uploading 9000 images

I needed mediawiki version 1.15 to upload my wikia's 9,000 images but godaddy software only automatically created mediawikis which were version 1.16.

At this point I was so tired and willing to pay for the problem to go away. So, starting over, I erased my old wiki, and paid someone $65 (with a $4.95 paypal card fee) to install version 1.15 on November 22.

Great, I thought, things were finally turning around. I can put this nightmare behind me and start editing again. I really missed playing my game, I missed taking screenshots, I missed building.

I used a fairly simple a special program and over the course of two days used SmartFTP client to upload my 9,000 images. Godaddy would occasionally time out when using this extension, which made the process much slower but not impossible.

Godaddy lies

 * Transferring wiki pages

So, now I had all of my wiki's images. But I needed all the wiki pages transferred.

Because of the limits of special:import, I had to copy and paste all page names using Special:AllPages and use Special:Export a dozen times.

But Special:import continued to time out on godaddy when I was trying to transfer pages, even a small number of pages. It got to the point where godaddy would seem to throttle my website, and literally only allow me to upload one page at a time.

I also noticed that I was getting "500 Internal server error" errors on my godaddy shared hosting website and some of my core, most important pages refused to load ever. I called godaddy and the person on the phone said the server errors were a server (godaddy) problem, but that they were "unable to duplicate the error" E-mails were the same, godaddy stated verbatium: "I was unable to duplicate any slowness on your web site at this time."

Using an online tool I found out that the "I was unable to duplicate any slowness on your web site at this time" was a lie. I also noticed that my godaddy shared server account was always 10 to 20 times slower than my wikia pages.

Googling the exact same sentence:
 * "I was unable to duplicate any slowness on your web site at this time"

I realized that godaddy said this to everyone, and they were lying to me. I filed a complaint with the Arizona Attorney Generals office, where godaddy is headquartered.

Anno1404 19:00, 27 November 2010 (UTC)