Mingtiandi is Back Online

Hi Folks,

We are back online here at Mingtiandi, and after eight months of site building and eleven months of company constructing, our new site, www.Rightsite.asia is nearly ready.  Here’s the latest.

Hosting Migration

We have been struggling with migrating this blog, our IDAAWorld.org site, and our email to a new host this week.  These are supposed to be routine processes, but due to my being something of a techno-dunce, and also due to the fact that things often don’t happen quite the way they are supposed to, it has taken a lot more time than expected to complete this migration.

But now you are looking at the same old Mingtiandi.com on a new host, Media Temple.  Everything seems to work, and the site seems a bit faster, so apart from a few dents in my skull from banging my head against the wall, life is pretty good.

RightSite Migration

At the same time that I have been moving the blog, our development team in India has been migrating our site to the same new host as Mingtiandi.com.  This has meant making sure that all elements of the new host are aligned and adjusted the same way as our development platform, and this has meant a few support emails to the hosting company for explanations, instructions and just plain assistance.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we are using Media Temple’s Gridserver hosting, and this seems to be working well for us so far. Here are the good and bad points if you may be considering this hosting product:

Advantages:

• Price — at $20/month it’s pretty cheap
• Dependability — As a cloud-based platform there is a lot of redundancy built in, so it should be reliable
• GUI Interface — We techno-phobes appreciate a control panel with pretty pictures and stuff to click on.  command line interfaces bring back very foggy memories of working at a dumb terminal trying to get a pdp 11/70 mainframe to spit out my freshman year term papers
• Scalability — Media Temple offers a very wide variety of services, so if we outgrow our current package, it should be fairly easy to upgrade
• Speed — even in China, the access times for this US-based service seem pretty ok (but we will see how things go once we actually populate the site with data)
• Knowledgeable support — the email support function has provided knowledgeable answers to some complex questions in a way that dummies like me can understand

Disadvantages:

• Limited root access — the GUI interface limits admin level tasks to the server administrator.  This means if I want someone to install or edit something on the site, other than text, then I end up giving our my server admin id – OUCH!
• No sudo access — although it runs on a Linux platform, the gridserver lacks the all important sudo — this means that our ability to perform admin functions is fairly limited
• Support speed – support replies can take 2-9 hours by email

Site Outlook

We are hoping to launch the private beta of RightSite.Asia on Monday, December 1.  Here’s what has to happen before then.

• Migration clean-up — there are few items that broken during the move, so it will take a couple of days to fix all of these
• Data import — our team spent months building a directory of more than 1,500 industrial zones across China. Now it’s time to import all that information into its new home on RightSite.
• DNS redirect — we will redirect our domain nameservers from our old temporary site to the new site on the new host.  And then it’s showtime!