Many of you have asked for an update on our website, so I wanted to share what has been happening.
In May and June, customers were emailing to say they couldn’t access links in our newsletters or purchase printed books from our store.
We spent around 200 work hours building a beautiful new website to fix these issues, only to find out on Thursday, June 13, that our web hosting company, whom we had been with for 11 years, had not been bothering to update any software on our server.
A server is a bit like the hard drive on your computer. It holds all your files and photos and videos, as well as the programs and apps to make everything work great. Your computer runs on an operating system (OS), like Windows or Mac or iOS.
Servers are the same. When you visit a site like Homeschooling Torah, your device talks to our server and transfers the files and photos that make a site visible — from our server to your device.
It feels like a miracle, but it’s actually made possible by our server’s operating system and the software installed to make it run.
However, just as your phone has to periodically install updates to its operating system, servers are no different.
Sadly our hosting company was using an end-of-life operating system and severely out-of-date apps. Things that had always worked great were starting to break all over the place.
We immediately reached out to a representative from a new hosting company, who spent hours with us, explaining the process of migrating, or copying all our websites’ files from the old, broken server to a new one.
(Did you know it actually takes 6 websites to make up what you can see as Homeschooling Torah? It’s as if there are 6 buckets of information to deliver thousands of pages of blog posts, a store full of ebooks and printed books, an entire membership site with thousands of encrypted PDF curriculum downloads, a community for discussion, a fellowship finder, annual conference pages, webinar tools and video hosting software for live classes, and email delivery tools. It’s massive!)
On that June day, as Sabbath was about to start, we made the decision to switch to the new host. They would start migrating files as soon as Sabbath was over. Our site was down for a few hours, but overall it was not too bad.
Except that things didn’t work as expected. When customers tried to purchase something or members made a monthly subscription payment, the site would show them a white screen or simply lose their payment. Curriculum files wouldn’t download properly and members who had been with us for years suddenly couldn’t access their lessons or accounts.
We started reaching out to developers, especially computer programmers who specialize in servers that host membership sites like ours. In 25 years of building websites, I had never seen anything like it!
(Funny side note… Our Homeschooling Torah team is very experienced at making websites. Between me and my seven children, ages 14-28, we have built several hundred websites. One developer even invited me to apply for a job at his company and said he had never seen such “clean” code on websites like Homeschooling Torah has. Thank you, Father — but I prefer being a wife and mom and serving in ministry as a curriculum writer. LOL!)
It finally came to light that the new hosting company’s server just couldn’t handle the special needs of our site. We were told that our site was unique, and that only 1% of websites in the world had requirements like ours did. I always knew we were special!
They told us we needed our own server, run and maintained by us, with our own specialized operating system and apps.
I thought we would spend this summer writing Word Power, Hebrew, Science, and Arithmetic. Instead, for over 30 days I’ve been waking at 7 AM and going to bed after midnight, helping to install everything on a custom-made server. My oldest son has been working a full-time job by day and helping program our server until the wee hours of the morning. We pulled a few all-nighters as well, trying to fix issues at night when most of our customers would be sleeping.
We finished on Monday and began to migrate a second time, copying all our websites’ files from the commercial hosting company to our own custom server.
Every part of the site is now functional — except we can’t login to the member site.
It appears we are missing one tiny piece of computer code, in a sea of 15 GB of code.
It’s so close, so we are asking you all to pray for us, to have wisdom and supernatural abilities to correct the site. Pray also for our health and stamina. Our great Elohim, the same one who gave Solomon wisdom and who guided Daniel and who worked miracles for the apostles—He is able to help us!
We praise Him for the “problem” of making Homeschooling Torah unique from 2013 until now. He has always provided and made a way for families to study the Bible as their primary textbook. His Word changes lives, and we are so honored to be His servants.
Please pray with us about this summer, that He would restore what the locusts have eaten and would bless every family using Homeschooling Torah.
(And when the websites are fully functional, we should have a big party, all of us together. We are considering some cool giveaways. Stay tuned!!)
P.S. While we can’t make the member site appear until the unknown error is fixed, we are happy to assist our members by emailing you curriculum files and supporting you by email. Contact us here.
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