Again, the Nightmare of Switching Hosts

By now it should be second nature to me to switch hosts and edit DNS records, but as always, it was a nightmare. I suspect that Tech Support very carefully avoids the whole subject, unless one is so knowledgeable that Tech Support isn't really needed. I wandered in the dark for several days, calling Tech Support for the various entities--Network Solutions (my registrar), Yahoo Small Business (my old host), and Google New Sites (my new host). I read a multitude of articles, most of which also avoided the subject of DNS. It took awhile, but I did finally find a Google Support page that did list their IPs in the form of digits, which Network Solutions' Tech Support swore I would need. I did things in the wrong order, as often happens. That caused errors, some of which were humorous, and some of which were very sad. I changed my records in Yahoo, my site host, instead of switching the nameserver back to Network Solutions first. I changed my MX records in Yahoo before downloading my emails. For quite a few months, I was still able to access the old emails (not use it, but read and save old emails). I could use my new email. This was ideal, and I was saving some old emails I wanted to save. But something I did today deleted my entire old email access in a second. I think it was when I changed the IP number in Yahoo to point to my new site. Suddenly the old email archive was just gone, link and all. Sigh. Well, I needed to do a data-dump anyway (sour grapes).

Google's Tech Support wasn't sure what to do with some of the cNAMES and things in Yahoo's Domain Manager, and advised me to leave those be. These are the steps I took, not necessarily in the right order: built my new site using G Suites apps; verified domain ownership in Google; downloaded all needed files and images from Yahoo; moved a lot of content to my various blogs; changed MX records and selected cNAMES in Yahoo; put a redirect on my old index page; changed my nameserver back to Network Solutions; dumped many old pages from the old site's directory in Yahoo; and changed the aNAMES and MX records in Network Solutions. Possibly, I should have changed only the cNAMES in Network Solutions, and used a free redirect as a pointer for my "naked domain" (domain name without the "www"). Right now, things seem fine. I did have a few glitchy moments when my computer or phone would arbitrarily serve up my old index page, looking rather pitiful with its now-broken images and links. But I added some redirects in my old index page's meta tags (not recommended, they all said, but then they also said it's easy to do, go ahead and do it); adding a permalink as a bookmark on the main page; and deleting many old pages. Afterwards, my new site came up pretty consistently. I called a friend, and it came up for her, too. I still have to wait several days for propagation and dread the day that my Yahoo Small Business account expires, because it's possible that I put the wrong DNS pointers in there somewhere. Yahoo had told me that when the account expired, it would no longer serve up files or records for me, and I could revert back to Network Solutions. I jumped the gun on that and did it today. If all is well, my site will stay up and running no matter what. If something's wrong, I guess I can log into Network Solutions and see if I can remember what to do with aNAMES, cNAMES, and MX records....