So last weekend our cat died, our household server died, and I also received a surprise email from the fine people over at GoDaddy. In the midst of everything else happening last weekend, they informed me my hosting account was expiring in just a few days and if I did not pay them hundreds of dollars all my data would be deleted. I knew my account was going to expire but I did not know when. I was planning to migrate all my data over to SiteGround where my other websites live but I was waiting for the correct time. I guess the time was now!
I performed several backups and using procedures I had learned years ago I moved everything over – and nothing worked. Last weekend I did not have time to work on this but I spent a few hours on it today. Here are the lessons I learned:
1. In configuring the DNS on the GoDaddy side, the CNAME records needed to point to locations on the same domain, they could not point to something outside of philpersson.name. I needed to delete the CNAME records I had created as they were messing up the redirect.
2. I could setup a redirect (type 301) but it had to point to a subdomain, not a folder. Therefore, I had to create philpersson.perssontechnologies.com on the SiteGround side.
3. I discovered the hard way that I did not want to redirect with masking. With masking on, every single page on the remote server had the same URL (philpersson.name) which was worthless.
4. Every change I made on the SiteGround side would not be reflected on the web until I went into the SiteGround dashboard and purged the cache for my website.
I think that everything is up and running now!