The Tekblog

Even though I am not a web designer, I get several dozen requests a year to relocate a customer’s website to a new hosting provider. This is something I am happy to do for a customer if they have a relatively simple website, otherwise I refer them to a web design firm. Some things you want to consider before accepting this task are:

*see comment above about not being a web designer*

1.) Forms: Does the website use any custom forms? This is an important piece of information to know because these forms can sometimes be tricky. What I mean is that if the previous host has a public CGI-BIN folder where scripts reside and it sits outside of the website’s directory structure, you may need to snarf this file manually in order for the form to work correctly once you have fork-lifted to the new host. You may have to enlist a Web Designer for assistance getting forms working on the new host.

2.) Microsoft FrontPage Extensions: Just hearing this phrase makes me gag. I am going to go ahead and put out there that I hate Front Page Extensions. Basically it is code that sits on your webhost that allows for one click, live changes to your website from Frontpage (which is no longer called Frontpage). If your customer is used to using this "feature", you want to make sure the new host supports this. Better yet, you could explain to your client that Frontpage Extensions have been riddled with security holes and there are better, and debatably more modern ways of handling the uploading of changes to your site like <gasp> FTP. Front Page Server Extensions’ last version was released in 02′.

3.) Coding: Any good web host should offer a plethora of feature sets for your site. Some sites are written using PHP and others ASP. Either one of these technologies require that the hosting server support them if they are to be rendered correctly in your browser. *see above comment about not being a web designer* I have seen hosts that require that you toggle one or the other ‘ON’ in order to utilize them. There is typically some kind of hosting control panel (like CPANEL) to manipulate specific features of the hosting server.

When you have considered these things and you are ready to move forward, there is a great application called HTTrack that I have used for years to make "offline" copies of websites. Basically what this program does is crawl the site’s code and suck down the site to a local directory. The program is simple and intuitive; once you have the site copied, you browse through it to make sure everything is there-intact. Once this is confirmed, you can log in to your new hosting provider and upload the site. The only drawback to HTTrack is that it does add comment tags in all of the HTML documents that this site was copied by HTTrack; you could edit this out but it would take quite awhile. Once you have uploaded the site, simply change the WWW and @ ‘A’ records in DNS to point to the IP address of the new host.

As an aside; in my experience, DNS is one of the most commonly misunderstood Internet technologies. This has been especially apparent when Web Designers contact me on behalf of my customers and start talking DNS to me. It is amazing to me how many people do not understand this technology. We have more problems caused by DNS changes made by Web Designers who do not understand the technology well enough than one would believe. I just thought I’d throw that out there; I am sure I am not the only IT consultant / network engineer that has had that experience.