Help request: transferring a site

[amethysta]

I've volunteered to be the web master of our local beekeepers group. (Yay!) They are currently using Go-Daddy (probably Fat Cow for their greeness) and I would like to transfer them to a different host site when their renewal is up next month. Has anyone ever transferred a web site? Do I need to do it on the day of the expiration? Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

[siderea]

No, it's exactly like a lease (you're renting space on someone's server.) You need to do it by the day it's up (if you're not renewing) but you can start moving your stuff in and configuring it in the new place as soon as you have signed the lease and gotten the keys.

You should be able to transfer the site in advance, and have some sort of temporary URL you can review the site at, making sure everything looks right and runs right, and ironing out the bugs, before throwing the switch to repoint the domain name to the new host. You can ask the target host how they can support you doing that.

Indeed, this qualifies as a technical pre-sales question, and the right people to ask are the support people at the companies you are considering moving to. Most companies have a lot of support to help people pay them money. :)

How much tsuris a site move is depends on how much technology it relies on. If it's static HTML pages, it's pretty trivial to move them. If you're using any sort of blog, CMS, gallery, CGI, framework, etc., well, things get more interesting. The very first thing to do is go through what you have and make an itemized list of every application or server technology you depend on.

For instance, if you are running a WordPress site, you'll need to figure out which version of WP; WP, in turn, relies on PHP and some flavor of SQL (presumably MySQL, but I'm not sure it's required -- you could be using something else maybe?). You'd need to find out which version of PHP you're using (and better which versions of PHP are acceptable), and which SQL and which version of it. Also, you may have certain options turned on in WP which require certain things like image-handling libraries to be installed in PHP. So you'd make a list of all this, and before giving anybody any money, you'd ask, "Hey, would your company support my running WP11 with PHP 7.2, MySQL 41252.1.25, and ImageMagik 13?"

I picked WP because WP and PHP have some notorious compatibility issues in the hosting world, but any technology could be a hang up.

The other way to handle it is find a place that gives you a free trial month, and just throw it against the wall to see what sticks.