Monday was a long, confusing day for me. I’m a freelance graphic designer, and after 2 years it was time to get serious about tracking visit to my design site. Google Analytics was about the most confusing, mysterious service anyone could have invented, and I really just needed a simple method to track site statistics. It needed to be deep in data but shallow in effort. And something better to look at than Google Analytics would be a plus.

I immediately turned to Mint, a simple web analytics application created by Shaun Inman, of Fever fame. Gorgeous. Simple. Rich in detail. And runs off your own host. Having already purchased Inman’s Fever RSS app, I assume I was in for a simple, short install process. However, things got ugly quick.

No, it wasn’t Mint’s fault. See, for the last 2 years I have hosted my site at GoDaddy. Never mind the poorly designed and terribly organized user interface, there were other things bad about GoDaddy. No IMAP email support for their hosted sites. And if you are like me and want your email synchronized between devices, then your only hope was to rig up some Google Apps and duct tape in some weird MacGuyver immitation. I did it, to get by, but it wasn’t ideal.

So needless to say, I’ve been itching for an excuse to move to a new hosting provider. In particular, I have read countless positive reviews of MediaTemple and their amazing products and services geared toward designers. So when I began the process of installing Mint on my GoDaddy server, I will admit I was a bit hopeful for a compatibility issue. And I was not disappointed.

As it turns out, GoDaddy’s servers don’t work with mint. Or, at least, that’s what I was reading. See, after dropping the “Mint” folder into my GoDaddy hosting folder, nothing happened. It wasn’t working. I dug around, read that the two were not compatible, and took that slim excuse and ran with it. Within 20 minutes I was up and running on MediaTemple.

I did everything right. I created an account for my domain name, copied all the HTML files from my old server to the new (leaving the old site up and running during the process, of course), and set up the MySQL database I would need for Mint and Fever. Backed up my Fever RSS archive. And then settled in for the nasty DNS/MX changes that awaited me.

The DNS was fine, honestly. But GoDaddy never had IMAP email, and since I like to have my accounts synced across multiple devices, I have created a Google Apps account to catch the email and present it in IMAP format. So, even though MediaTemple does have IMAP, I thought I would stick with Google’s service (not sure why) and immediately deleted my A and MX records and reinserted the Google Apps information.

Mint, however, was presenting me with some issues. I couldn’t actually get it to run. I had dropped the “Mint” folder into my HTML folder on the server, but the URL for Mint wasn’t pulling up anything. I was stumped. I checked my database settings over a dozen times. I couldn’t seem to find a good help article, and nothing was working. But after a couple of hours, lots of breaks, and some “deep reflection”, I figured out what I had done wrong.

When you download Mint, it’s in a ZIP format. Unzipped, you get a folder called “Mint”, containing a README.txt file, and a folder (redundantly) called “Mint.” I was dropping the root folder onto my server, when in reality I should have been only uploading the inner “Mint” folder. Shaun Inman has built a gorgeous app, and his instructions are 90% clear, but this is one of those obvious items that should be listed, for the few who might make my mistake.

Once corrected, I immediately got the Mint install page, installed it, and was up. For an hour. Then the site went down. For over 18 hours. I reached out to MediaTemple for help, blamed it on a more widespread outage, and got very, very angry. A customer less than a day, and down for most of it. But as it turns out, the fault, again, was mine. In deleting all my A and MX records, I deleted the ones that ran my site. And so after the TTL kicked in, the site just went offline. Dead.

In the end, all is well. Mint is pushing out some amazingly detailed (and beautiful) statistics for my site. And I haven’t had a single glitch since. Now, I do have to wonder if GoDaddy really does run Mint, seeing as I never actually installed it correctly there. But I love the room to grow and future possibilities that MediaTemple offers me, including someday moving this blog over there. But until then, I’m happy to be settled into my new home.