At the beginning of February 2012, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s (ICI) website switched over to the cloud. What is the cloud, you may ask? It is not to be confused with Apple’s iCloud, which stores your music, photos, documents, and wirelessly pushes them to all your Apple devices. The cloud is a type of website hosting. Data is stored on clusters of servers, instead of a single stand-alone server. This provides increased reliability, reducing the risk of downtime by removing a single point of failure.
The ICI website uses Laughing Squid, an independently owned and operated cloud-based web hosting company from San Francisco that specializes in hosting for individuals, artists and bloggers. When the ICI first set up its website with Laughing Squid, they hosted our site on a single stand-alone server. Recently, though, they switched over to only offering cloud hosting. Due to this, the ICI website had to also make the journey of switching over to the cloud.
The process took several days, and the ICI’s social media consultant, Kelly Lee Barrett, spent some time preparing for the move by reading Laughing Squid’s instructions and other help forums, as well as getting advice from a long-time ICI associate and computer/web/graphic/art extraordinaire Antoinette LaFarge. Essentially, the task was to create a mirror site, and when that mirror site was ready, the old site disappears. You can only test the mirror site in a limited way, so backup of the entire website and databases was necessary. Laughing Squid’s step by step instructions were fairly simple, yet certain important information was left out regarding the aftermath of updating information in our WordPress blogs. This caused the ICI site to not work properly. We were left with blank white pages saying database errors! It seemed that the “cloud” was causing a dark storm over ICI.
Thankfully though, since the old site was backed up, we were prepared to restore everything from scratch if need be. With the help of Laughing Squid’s costumer support, we were finally able to solve the database error problem, and get the site actively running again. The ICI is still ironing out the wrinkles that came along with the switch over, and we would like to apologize for any glitches that arise. We are, however, very excited about our new cloud hosting, which includes a more affordable rate while providing more disk space, bandwidth and better email!
