Doing it the hard way

Our experiment is trying to take advantage of the (potentially) greater reliability of using cloud services for things like email and web service. The former project hasn't advanced far for technical reasons that may well prevent it going forward at all. The latter--well. Granted it isn't easy to find drupal experts.

We had a couple of public-facing web servers, one the new one and the other deprecated. We contracted with a group to set up the new web service and copy the pages from our newer server to the new cloud-based web server.

They set up the cloud server, and copied the pages from the old web server instead of the new one. And took at least an extra month at it. And now I think we know why.

Instead of just doing a copy of the web code and images from the old server to the cloud server, they apparently brought up each web page separately and transcribed it into a new one--adding typos and mislaying some figure captions along the way. Not copy-and-paste; this looks like they were typing.

One of our staff is going to fix it with a simple script to copy the data from the correct machine to the cloud one.

FWIW, I'm not persuaded that the cloud is more reliable. Amazon has had some high-profile failures recently, and when I click on a link on one of our pages, it doesn't always "take" the first time I click.