What The Heck Happened to the Merchant Processing Resource?

WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO THE MERCHANT PROCESSING RESOURCE?

We’ve had a lot of design changes implemented to our site in the last year. We hope this is the last one. Thank you for your patience!

Bottom line: Our previous web host sucked (Webs.com). Their dns servers were always down late at night and on weekends for “maintenance.” Their site building tools would crash 90% of the time and their technology is so old that it was impossible to do pretty much anything other than post a blog.

So we found new hosting and prepared ourselves to move the site in its original format but Webs.com disabled our access to FTP, making it impossible to retrieve our files. It appears they did this to discourage us from leaving them. That was the last straw.

So without FTP access, we were stuck with figuring out how to move thousands and thousands of pages. Not to mention, we figured out that Webs was hosting many files remotely, so we wouldn’t have been able to access most of our content anyway.

We got creative and reverted back to primitive programming on the OS X unix terminal, using curl –O commands against our sitemap to download our site through http into individual files.

So now we have the raw data, but the CSS stylesheets are gone. That means the pages are up but they’re styled like it’s 1994. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

In the next week (that’s what we say but it will probably take longer), we intend to repost that content into our wordpress theme. The old files will probably be given a 301 redirect to prevent ’404 File not found’ errors for indexed urls.

deBanked has big plans for the rest of 2011 and 2012, especially with the amount of traffic we were getting while using the old, useless format.

In the meantime, you can forward all questions to webmaster@merchantprocessingresource.com

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Update 8/24 All old articles have been republished to the site in a readable format. Their dates/timestamps are still wrong but the original urls are intact.

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.