Moving Your Website to a New Hosting Company

One of the most common calls we get is people asking if we have a way to transfer a wordpress website to pageBuzz. With so many people moving from wordpress they are all looking for simple solutions to do that, but there is no simple answer to move any website to a new host.

The process of moving a website to a new host is not that complicated, it wont hurt you in the searches and if done properly wont even impact your website, customers or business. There should be no downtime at all or any disruption in service.

But that is assuming you move the exact website using the same software to a new server or network with the exact same operating system and architecture.

When you talk about site builders and Content Management Systems, they are very specific and switching is usually not a simple process. Since all the files and pages are written in a manner that works with its own CMS it is not likely compatible with any other CMS.

So if you have a wordpress based website and you need something more comprehensive like pageBuzz, you can't just download the website and upload it to pageBuzz.com. This is why we stress so much in all of our articles to make sure you choose the right host in the first place.

What are some of the different hosting models?

• FTP Access static HTML Website

• FTP Access Dynamic website ecommerce

• Word press or Popular CMS

• Site builders Like #pageBuzz

What is the process of transitioning from one host to another?

First let me say that moving a website from one host to another can be like swapping an engine in a car. If you swap a Chevy engine with a Chevy engine it can be quite easy but if you swap a Toyota engine with a Chevy almost everything needs to be changed, every part fits differently and it become expensive and require a lot of manual custom work.

Moving website is much the same.

Moving from one host to another that offers the same CMS such as word press could be as simple as zipping up the files, uploading hem to the new server and unzipping them. This is done all the time in just minutes and is a very simple process.

That is, if everything on the new host is exactly the same.

For static pages, this is never a problem. Pages can be moved anywhere and there is really no impact.

But when programming is involved such as ecommerce websites that gets so much more complicated.

For one, you need to make sure the new host uses the same operating system supports your programming language and all of the programs need to be modified with the new data and file paths.

If you are running your website on a windows based server, moving to Linux servers can be a real problem. For one, windows is not case sensitive and Linux is, so programs may not work the same way if the programming is not compatible with both operating systems.

You also have to consider the paths. Even when changing a website from one server to another using the same operating system it is unlikely that they bot use the same paths to your website. So any program that accesses data will need to be checked and modified if absolute paths are used and they are in most cases.

You also have to consider if the program was built using modules. If your program uses outside modules then you need to make sure the new server also has those modules installed. With shared hosting you would need to get the system administrator to install them for you and that can take time. Systems that use cpanel usually allow you to install them yourself if you know what to do.

But here is another issue to consider. If the module has been updated since the last time you added it, then it may not work the same way and your programs may not work. So you may be fighting code that you don't even have access to or understand what it is doing.

These are important issues to consider when moving websites or when planning your website to begin with because you need to plan for potability or get set for the long haul with your host.

Of course, even if you don't move, servers get updated and replaced and your website programming could stop working at any time when those changes are made as well, so you will get used to running your own programming quickly.

In most cases, if you don't have experience in programming and you want to move a website you are faced with starting over again. Rebuilding the website using the tools at the new host.

If you have a shopping cart with 2000 products then hopefully you have a database of the products that can be imported to any website with a shopping cart. If not, you might be stuck adding one item at a time until you are done.

The pages might be the same. You can copy and paste the pages into a new CMS but image paths might be different just like programming paths, so you may have to upload images and insert them into the pages manually.

If your old CMS was data driven then you might not even have pages. You might have a template that gets populated with data, such as page name, site title and text and then you really have nothing to work with unless you can find the exact same programming at a new host.

As this article drags on I realize I have not really give you any information on how t move a website but only that it is more complicated that packing the pages in a UHaul and unpacking them at a new location.

While people think if they have a website it could be hosted anywhere, that is just not the case.

Domain names can be hosted anywhere. They can be used at any host so you are never stuck where you are, but that does not mean the content is transportable in the current format.

The Internet is so complicated, it isn't that way in real life.

Yes it is, for example, lets say you publish a book in the USA and it sell very well. Now you want to publish it in France, Spain and Italy. The book needs to be translated, reprinted and maybe even modified to suit those cultures, customs and beliefs.

There is no easy way to take something built for one host and move it to a completely different host.

This is the same in any business, if you have $10,000 CPU for a Nimbus 2000 and want to use it in a Univac system, it just wont fit. So that $10,00 part is scrap.

If you are tired of your windows server being down all the time and want to switch to something more reliable like Linux then you might have more of a project than just uploading the website to a new server.

We all want things to be simple, but even though systems like pageBuzz make complex technology easy to use, there is nothing simple about the back end that runs it.

Unfortunately, you can't just expect that custom websites that were built from the ground up to be hosted in place would have any type of portability built in.