Home Technical Support How To Switch Website Hosting Providers - Part II

How To Switch Website Hosting Providers - Part II

Step 4: Setup New Host

Congratulations, by now you should have received your new Brandblast account information and are ready to start setting your account.

You should be given an IP address, a login & password, name server information (primary and secondary) and links to your control panel.  You will also want to change your password because your initial password for security purposes. Make copies of this information and put it in a safe place.  If you plan on using frontpage, the password must be changed in both your control panel and in frontpage.

You should be able to connect to your new site right away via your temporary address provided in your welcome email.  Try connecting to your site with your ftp program or web editing software and create and upload a temporary index.html (or appropriate variation) page.  Then type the temporary address into your browser and make sure your new page shows up.

Now you are ready to upload your files.  Upload all your files and be sure to use your current directory structure. Don't overwrite or delete any important files your new host provided you with - this may result in contacting technical support to reinstall those files.

If you use permissions on any of your folders, be sure to make those changes.  CGI scripts go into the cgi-bin directory.

Step 5: Test, Test, and Test

Testing your site before flipping the DNS switch is very important.  Customers can't see the new site yet, so now is your chance to work out all the bugs.

If your site links use relative paths, you should be able to view the newly uploaded site in your browser.  If you use absolute paths, then it will end up clicking over to your new host, so you will either need to switch to relative paths or you can type in the correct page name in order to view it.

Check all your pages to see if they mirror what is on your old host.  Make sure all the pages exist and the links point to the right places. 

Carefully test all of your forms and check all of your scripts (many scripts will require editing).  Make sure you don't have extra code from your previous host (especially if they were running the advertising on your site) - you will want to remove this code if it exists.

We recommend using a link checker after you do all the manual testing.  Good link checkers will let you know of possible broken links and should help you fix them.  You will want to run your link checker again after switching hosts.