Having now hit the mid-point in our Claremont Conversation Project, we decided it was time to move off of “SlowDaddy” and onto our lab server. We did a test run the week before, and so were not expecting any problems. Ha!
It was a learning experience. We learned that transferring files on an iPod sometimes changes the file name case. In case you are wondering, yes that makes a big difference on a Linux system. It took us several hours to figure out why some of the user icons weren't working, and how the file names were getting messed up.
We learned that the MySQL installation on our lab server defaults to a Czechoslovakian Unicode character set, the only consequence of such being that curly quotes and words like résumé become rendered very oddly.
We learned that using FileZilla with GoDaddy only works if you turn off the “multiple connections” feature. GoDaddy FTP completely blows chunks, and we ended up having to manually download individual folders to prevent timeout errors.
In any case, we now have our installation running on a reliable and speedy server. With any luck, nothing else significant will go wrong in the next couple months, and our users will have a much more pleasant experience.
Keywords: godaddy_blows_chunks, installation, upload
