Mar
5
Moving Website Fast and Without Problems or Downtime
I recently received an email from a small business owner who was having problems with their Internet marketing company. They are one of those service providers that make clients also use them for web hosting. While it is true that having a clients site located on my Rackspace servers makes my life easier, it isn’t required. Here is more information about Rackspace and a moving a website without penalty checklist.
The first thing when dealing with a web host or whoever has control over your site is it to not tell them you are planning to make a move. Yes, this sounds a little underhanded, but they can turn you off in 1 second and then you are out of luck. I have had that happen to some customers in the past where either their hosting company either just went out of business or turned them off. The first step is know everything you need about your domain!
Control Your Domain
If you don’t have your domain information handy you can always do a whois search, rather than the actual whois.com website I use a services called Network Tools which can dig up all kinds of info about your site and the server it is hosted on. Just check the whois button and type your full domain in the box where your ip address is. Here is a screenshot:
When you type in your domain name, only use the www.domain.com, not the http://
After hitting submit, the results will show up on the screen. The most important part is who owns the site and where the nameservers are! The nameservers are how your domain is found on the Internet. Every website has an IP address, that is like your mailbox or address at your brick and mortar business. The DNS handles pointing inquiring computers to your domain.
My site is protected so not all the info comes up in a general search. If you don’t know who has the ownership of your domain, the best thing to do is make contact with either godaddy.com or networksolutions.com if you are in the United States. If your host or web designer registered your domain for you, but kept the ownership under their name, you will have to go through the process of domain transfer. This can be a gruelling process, but the bottom line is if you own a company like Knight Roofing, and your domain is knightroofing.com all it will take is a fax to Network Solutions on your letter head and you will be able to get ownership of the domain.
Ambiguous domains or domains that don’t have your company in the name are going to be harder to obtain ownership if you have to fight it out. Unless your site has good placement and is well branded it might be easier to just start over.
The next task is to get a copy of the site so you can get it running on another server. This can be another problematic step. I have had to completely rip sites using custom GET scripts that literally rip everything about a site off of the server. A database driven site can’t be gotten this way, you must get a copy of the database.
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