I’ve been busy working on our new BeerChief server today / yesterday (9pm -1am)…

At long last the site is now up and running on it and all we have to do is rename and move a few files to ‘launch’ it. Thankfully, it seems pretty snappy right out of the box, so speed shouldn’t be an issue.

Transferring the domain ‘beerchief.com’ wasn’t as simple as changing the nameservers like i’d normally do… because the site is on dedicated server, i had to set up custom nameservers and wait for them to propagate. So the nameserver addresses are now ns1.beerchief.com / ns2.beerchief.com

Incredibly boring stuff, i know, but it has to be done

I’ve set up ftp & PhpMyAdmin accounts for us plus i’ve also set up several email addresses. Last but not least i’ve transferred the old landing page over to the new server… it was previously hosted on one of my shared hosting accounts at Dreamhost. Tomorrow (today really), i’ll try and create a more appealing landing page and i’ll also try to finalise an exact launch date.

I’ll also have to set up a subdomain for the BeerChief blog and create a new theme to match our site design. The work will never stop. But then again there’d be something wrong if it did…

This ‘launch’ won’t be a public one, like i thought it would be… it’s just too risky to do that without any BETA testing, so what we’ll do is password protect the site and allow access to everyone who’s signed up thus far and basically anyone who’s interested in seeing what it’s all about… we’ll also post on webmaster forums looking for feedback.

The site is good enough to launch… believe me, i’ve seen worse but to do things right and help break us in gently, some sort of private testing is the sensible option.

There won’t be any ‘promotion’ work by us at this stage although you may see the site mentioned on forums (that’s purely for feedback), it will be a low profile BETA launch, we’ll gather feedback, make changes accordingly and generally try to iron out any bugs or problems you guys encounter.

By the time we’re ready to unleash the site in full, we hope to have;

(a) built up a pretty large community of a few hundred members

(b) ironed out all bugs and glitches

(c) reacted to feedback and made improvements

Anyhow, it still means you guys will be able to check out BeerChief within the next week.