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Steps to follow
in Shifting your Website to our Servers
Contrary to belief, moving your site to a new
web host is easy, if you take care of a few points.
Follow these steps to ensure that your site is moved
as quickly as possible, while also minimizing (or
even eliminating) the need for any site downtime.
Before starting you have the following information,
From your Existing
web host & Our servers -
Step 1: Creating your email accounts:
Login to your Hosting Control panel (HELM/CPanel).
The URL and username password will in your activation
email. Create all your existing email (POP3) accounts
and any new accounts you plan to use immediately.
This is required, to enable emails sent to these
email accounts, to be received by at our hosting
server. Configuring your email accounts in advance,
before transferring your domain name, allows you
to avoid any bounced or lost emails.
Step 2: Backup your existing website
to your HDD
Download
a latest copy of your existing website, at you existing
web host, to your HDD (Hard Disk Drive). You
may do this via FTP. If required, Please see
FTP Tutorials
for same. You will need username & password
of your existing web-host to login. At the end of
this process, you will have a folder on your computer
containing your entire web site and databases.
Step 3: Upload your site
to our server
Please
open your website backup, from your computer's HDD,
in a web browser and check if you backup is accurate
& latest. Once you have verified that, you now need
to connect to the FTP server of your new web hosting,
log in using the user name and password provided
in your activation email, upload the pages, pictures
& databases into the public_html (Linux OS) / wwwroot
(Windows OS), as applicable. Please see
FTP Tutorial using
on popular FTP clients. Once complete you will have
a replica of you HDD website on your web hosting
server.
Step 4: Database Shift & Configuration
Create
the database(s) (MySQL/MSSQL) via the hosting control
panel (cPanel/HELM). Create a USER for the database
and map the DB to the USER.
Now
you need to upload the data into the database,
For MySQL - please use PhpMyAdmin link available
via your Hosting Control Panel (cPanel/HELM) and
upload your data dump into your database. (Using
PhpMyAdmin to restore your database).
For MSSQL - please populate the database using
DTS or SQL log or 3rd party tool, depending on the
type/size of the database. (Using
DTS to restore your SQL database), It is best
to use Microsoft Enterprise Manager to manage your
SQL2005 database. (Connect
to SQL database via Enterprise Manager)
For MS Access, Text DB or Javascript DBs - please
copy the databases via FTP to the appropriate location
on your server. For optimal security is is preferred
to copy the Access database(s) into the /db/ directory
and create a DSN via HELM for the same. This DSN
is then called by your script. As the database resides
outside your wwwroot directory, it is secure.
Now
modify your scripts, to reflect the database name,
password, database server or DSN accurately.
Step 5: Domain name pointing change
Changing
the pointing of your domain name involves modifying
your domain name record (at your domain registrar).
Such that, instead of pointing to your web site
on your old web host, it points to the address of
your site on our server. This involves change of
the DNS setting (Name Servers) via the Domain Name's
Control panel to the DNS settings of our web host
server.
The exact procedure for doing this will vary
between domain registrars. It would normally involve
login to the domain name control panel, at your
domain registrar and modifying the DNS settings
as per your activation email. See Flash movie
tutorials for doing this, for popular domain registrars,
at the
Support
Page.
On completion of above, you should allow 24-36
hours for complete propagation of your domain name
servers changes across all locations and protocols.
After this period your website will be working from
your New Servers.
Caution: The tutorial above is meant for
persons with some prior knowledge of the computers,
internet & web hosting. If you donot have any previous
knowledge of the internet/web hosting or
have a complex website or have a mission
critical website, we recommend you ask us to do
a professional website transfer for a nominal cost.
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