by
Benedict Chiu
You've
decided it's time to become serious about your Web presence and that means
finding a more reliable host. Ben makes the process easy with a few valuable
pointers.
Moving to a New Host
by
Benedict Chiu
As a webmaster, you will usually come to a point where you've
outgrown your host; you're getting consistently bad tech support, the server's
going down all the time, and perhaps you see another host that you like more
than your current one. Either way, it means backing up your site, database and
scripts, and shifting all of it to your new host, hopefully without any hassle.
It's harder if you're a reseller and have to move clients, because they'll be
used to the current service and will have to adapt to anything that's new.
So how do you ensure your moving day is as stress-free as
possible while making the move transparent to everyone, particularly your
customers?
1.
Get your account at your new host setup first, and then back up your current
site.
Sign up for your new host and wait for your account to be
activated. Some hosts have an automated setup while others will set it up for
you manually, so give them up to 24 hours. If they take longer than that without
good reason, then choose the next host on your shortlist... you did have a
shortlist of good hosts, right? The account information you receive should
contain vital information such as your login username and password, and
instructions on how to transfer your files to your site. Most sites will either
have a static IP address (like 64.65.54.75 - we'll use this for our examples) or
a temporary hostname set up for you. Tip: Make sure you inform your new host
that you don't intend to move the domain name until everything is uploaded and
tested.
While you're waiting for your site to be activated, create a
new temporary directory on your hard drive. FTP into your old site and download
everything into this newly created directory, replicating your site on your hard
drive. Make sure you download everything in the correct mode: ASCII mode for
HTML/PHP/ASP/Perl pages or scripts, and binary mode for images.
Please don't forget to back up your databases as well if you
are running any! It's simple for Access databases (simply download the current
copy to your hard drive and re-upload), but for MySQL and PostGresSQL databases
you will have to do a dump of your tables and then re-insert them on your new
host.
Once you have everything replicated on your hard drive and the
account on the new host is active, then upload everything (basically the
opposite of what you did before) except your CGI/Perl scripts. You should check
with your host as to the path to Perl (as it may be different) and adjust your
scripts accordingly before uploading to your new account.
2.
Check the site on the new account works.
Once you've finished uploading, open up your Internet browser
and go to your new site using the address your new host provided (for example,
http://64.65.54.75). Test out various pages that you've uploaded to check that
everything works. Some of the links you click on that lead to other pages in
your site may send you to the old site - that's fine, don't worry about it. That
is called 'absolute linking'; what happens is that your HTML pages have URLs in
link tags like 'http://www.yourdomain.com/someotherpage.html' instead of just 'someotherpage.html'
(which is relative linking). Feel free to change any absolute links you can do
without, but in general you can leave these alone; they'll work just fine once
your domain name is transferred over to the new server.
You should also take this opportunity to test your scripts to
ensure that they work, make necessary adjustments to ensure they run properly.
Take advantage of our free resources,
knowledge and experience in the