I am new to Web Hosting and just about to take over our local club website. The website is currently hosted on someone’s personal webspace with a .co.uk domain.

Basically I have signed up with a Web hosting company for 200MB of webspace and have transferred the site across – I don’t want to change the nameserver for the live .co.uk domain yet as I wanted to test that the new site is up and running, this is avoid down-time if something goes wrong.

I have been told by the hosting company that I can’t access the site until the .co.uk domain nameserver has been updated and there is no other way to access the site until then.

Is this the norm?

How would you move site from one hosting company to another without downtime?


Malcolm

Often, clients are provided a temporary URL to access their website on the new server after they have signed up. (Atleast this is what we do). This way, you can upload all the content to the new server and check that everything works OK.

Then, when everything is set, you change the name servers of the domain to point to the new server.

This way you avoid any downtime, and the site will be up the moment the domain resolves to the new server.

If your web hosting plan offers dedicated IP, you could also try to access your new server that way.

You might also point a sub domain to your new server for testing purposes.

Hope this helps.

Agree with the previous post. You should have received a temporary URL to access your site with IP address.

It looks like this:

http://192.168.1.1/~youruserID/

That's what I would have expected - but I was told that the temporary access has been disable becasue of security reasons...After some emails they gave me temporary access for a few days which allowed me to check out that the site was working...

Thanks
Malcolm

Hi Malcolm

When using a temporary URL it can sometimes cause problems with PHP scripts not working properly by using the temporary URL because any decent host will have a security measure in place to prevent php scripts from being able to access another users web space.

The other proble with using temporary URL's is the levels of site navigation all get messed up due to have the /~username/ in front of your navigation so you may find images dont load properly too.

A common way around this is to register another domain name similar to the one you already have for example if you have to move your .co.uk domain then you might want to register the .com or .net domain to use while testing the website to ensure everything works properly.

Then once your happy its all working you should be able to "park" your .co.uk domain on top of your other domain name then change your nameservers and everything will work just fine

We hope this helps in your website move and makes a little more sense of things.

All the best
Richard Wraith
WESH UK Web Hosting

It's the virtual URL