Moving Customers

A few weeks back I have written about moving my freelance customers to a new server. Although I managed to buy the new at the end of last month, I only managed to move three out of twelve.

So a quarter is done, three quarters to do.

Moving the websites isn’t a tedious task. Copy the database, copy the files, change credentials and finally flip DNS over to the new server.

But moving the EMails is hard. Not only do the inboxes need to be synced to the new server, but also the customer needs to change the configuration on its side.

So the move needs to be worked out on one day when the customer has time to change their credentials. Because I have a bunch of work at my day job, only a few hours in the evenings are left. Most days my customers don’t have time at that time of the day.

I think it will take at least another month till all are on the new server. Meanwhile, I have to pay both which really hurts my income. My tax consultant also told me that I would need to have a small revenue this year or the ministry of finance will close down my business.

Fun times :)

2020-07-06

Almost a month ago I wrote about this topic. After some more moving today, only three customers are remaining on the old Server.

I can only move one of them, as I’ve got the account details. The other two will be moved by my coworker. I also found a huge problem on one of the moved sites. Luckily I could sort it out quickly. Somehow WordPress was pointing to some strange domain constellations.

For me, there is only the site of my first customer left to move. There are a bunch of email addresses that need to be moved and a small customer relationship management app I’ve written in PHP back in the day.

The fact that it still runs on PHP 5.6 doesn’t make me feel good. I would upgrade to the latest version, but I can’t as the code is really old. I tested running it on a newer version and immediately stopped. 7-year-old dumb code doesn’t work on modern PHP version. :)

Maybe it is time to re-write the whole thing, but nobody would pay for it. Maybe I should just do it and ask the customer later on if he wants to pay at least a little bit.