Living the Startup Life

I think the most frustrating thing that I have encountered with entrepreneurship are the technical hassles. And when I mean “technical hassles” I don’t mean anything extreme liking C++ or Java. I mean the simple things like setting up your blog, adding the stuff on the bottom like “digg this” or “stumble it”, and of course, changing main domain names.

For those of you who don’t know, you can have a main domain, add-on domains, and parked domains. So our original main domain for Future Delivery was www.fdnetwork.org. This was because Yu-kai Chou originally started a professional networking site called the FD Network. So we had thefdworld.com as an add-on domain on our host.

Anyways, I don’t want to get into the details about what add-on domain or parked domain names are. My point of this blog post is to warn you about completely nuking your website. When you “nuke” your website, it means that you are completely erasing EVERYTHING. We did this because we wanted to change our main domain name for SEO purposes. So before you nuke your website, make sure you have done these things:

1. Ask your host to back up your database
   • They won’t just do it automatically. You need to literally tell them to back up your database before you ask them to erase everything because once it’s gone, there’s no turning back.
2. Make sure it’s about midnight if you’re on Pacific Time
   • Many things can go wrong, and if you’re doing in during the middle of the day, chances are your website will be down while people are surfing the web. If you do it very late at night, then you have all night to try and get your website back up to spec
3. Back up all of your blog text and posts
   • It’s a very sad site to see all of your the blog posts that you have written in the past year go up in smoke. Make sure to back them up on your computer so that you can easily transition and post them back onto your site.
4. Write down all of the places that link back to your site and where your site is feeding into
   • One of the most important things about SEO is to have relevant sites link back to you. Once you nuke your site, your links are completely changed and you lose all SEO that you have developed. Make sure to write down every place that your site is linked from and linking to so that you can contact those places and see if they will re-link to you. Its always good to give it at least a try.

Our team member just fell to the floor in angony (in a joking manner) because the site is just not up and running like it was. We literally have to start everything over because we decided to nuke the site. So were learned a very valuable lesson: Do not nuke your site unless you truly have to. We could have figured out other ways to change our url and improve our SEO, but we were gung ho and wanted to charge! So, we paid the consequences. All experience is priceless though so I’m glad we went through it.