While I don’t like to share things I mess up on, this one cannot be overlooked.

I recently had a client upgrade from SiteGround’s “GrowBig” to “GoGeek” in order to take advantage of better performance and the staging site. While this seems a good idea, I forgot to consider that the site would be moved to a new server and would get a new IP address. This meant, of course, changing the IP in the domain registrar. While changing the IP was simple, I neglected to tell the client not to make updates until the transition was complete. This resulted in losing some updates and upsetting the client. Fortunately, the site had not yet been wiped from the old server.

SiteGround suggested editing my hosts file so I could point to the old IP. This allowed me to grab the changes. I then removed the pointer to the old IP from my hosts file and updated the site. For those of you not familiar with using a hosts file, it is a convenient way to see website on a specific IP. If you are using a Mac, here is some information on how to edit your hosts file.

I was lucky that I could grab those changes but realize that I need to be more careful when upgrading hosting plans.