WEBSITE WOES

The firm hosting my company website informed me that in 90 days they were shutting down their webhosting operation.

I wasn’t concerned – until I received a 2^nd email urging me to begin migrating my website to a new host at least 30 days before the clock ran down. That ominous warning caused me to suspect what I later confirmed.

It can take a lot longer than one might think to move a website to a new host. And bumps in the road abound.

While shopping around, I found some cheap webhosting. $3/mo. Or less. For the 1^st year. The 2^nd year the price could jump fourfold! Furthermore, email and domain registration often are added to the advertised price. I had no intention of hopping to a new webhost every year to take advantage of introductory offers. So ultimately I went with a host that bundled everything I needed, and did not raise the price after the first year.

I had created my original website using host supplied templates. Thus, I was not forced to buy Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver to quickly build my site. However, it also meant I did not have a copy of my website that I could just upload to my new host. Instead, I had to dissect and download every element of my original website to get a copy of my content to upload to the new host. Yuk.

My original website used ASP. This meant my web pages employed filenames of the ASP file type. My new host does not support ASP. Its web pages have to be of the file type HTML. This had some unexpected consequences. For one, people who had added my website to their Internet Favorites started getting a ‘page not found’ error when they selected that Favorite. The same thing happened when my old web pages showed up in a Google search. As a workaround, I put files on the new website named *.ASP, that contained a message indicating my new web page address. It is not a transparent solution, but at least visitors are no longer presented with a ‘Page Not Found’ message.

At the same time, I took a closer look at how my website appeared when run under Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, the iPAD and other tablet browsers. Wow! Variations abound. I ended up spending hours of time experimenting and tweaking code before I got results that were acceptable in all of the above.

I also learned that it takes days to get the Internet highway switched from one webhost to another. It is not a request you make one minute, and get results the next. In my case it took 5 days. And it took even longer to switch my domain name registration.

The bottom line is that it takes a surprising amount of time and effort to move to a new webhost. But my challenges pale in comparison to others who did not own their own domain name when their site shut down…