Stress and Aggravation

So if you ever visit either of my business blogs, you might already know that I am in the midst of a Code Red situation with my web sites. The short version (ha! short! You should hear the long version!) is that my web host company has apparently gone belly-up. Their web site is gone, the owner is incommunicado, and along with those pesky details is the bigger issue--the security certificates on my sites that allow it to be safe for payments to go through at checkout, has gone down with the business. So, the business sites are still there, but nobody can make it through the checkout. Sadly, this is the case for both of my businesses, plus tons of other ones out there.

So I'm in the process of moving to new shopping carts with new hosting. Which is an easy way of explaining that I have a whole humongous ton of work to do. Basically, everything that I have worked on and paid for to be done with my web sites for the past 2 years now needs to be undone and redone. Quickly.

While also homeschooling five children, and doing all of the other wife and mom things that I do in regular life, of course.

Try not to be jealous, please.

I have worked with many different techie guys to see if there is any lesser evil way for me to make this transition. There isn't. So yesterday I had to notify all of my customers that within a couple of days the sites are going to go down, and I'm not sure how long it will take to get them back up. I'll have to literally "turn off" the present sites and have no more access to them, and then "turn on" the new shopping cart/site which will then need to be customized with my design and have all of the products loaded into it. Which could be seriously time consuming. If all goes really, really well, maybe I could do my smaller site in a day. But, not much in this process has gone really, really well thus far, so I'm not counting on anything like that on the horizon. (hoping, yes. counting on: no.)

So it's a crazy, crazy time here. Right now I'm doing ok. I got all of the stuff off of site #1 yesterday, and tomorrow I will start working on getting the new version of the site going. In the meantime I'm working on taking the stuff off of site #2, and hope to be working on getting the new version of that one on Saturday. Wish me luck! (and you can watch my Twittering in the sidebar to the right, which may be all of the updates you will get from me for a couple days....I just don't know what to expect from this ride)