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This week I’m getting fresh practice in transferring sites to my hosting service for people who don’t know what to do. There are a few key things to keep in mind, and a certain sequence of events to follow. You might want to save this for a time when you’ll be moving your site. Chances are quite good that you will at least once or twice in your life online switch to another host. (Some restless folks do it several times a year).

Assuming you have shopping around or been referred to your new hosting service, you try to determine what special instructions they might have. If they don’t give you any, these generic instructions should work.

1. Evaluate what you have to work with.

Get access to the administrative panel or area of your domain at the new host. Look around for what you are allowed to do. Does it have a backup and restore feature? Is it the same type of admin panel as you have had in the past? cPanel is the best known and most used on the net, but here are others, and some hosts have designed their very own, original system.

2. Backup the current site/location.

If you are switching between hosts who both offer cPanel, you are in special luck. Because you can do a backup in the previous cPanel from which you are moving, and download it to your computer as it does the whole site backup. If you have any databases on your current site, you would do a separate backup of those, but in the same admin area.

3. Restore the site at the new location.

Login to the cPanel at the new host/location. Find the Backup icon or link, and from inside there, Use the “browse” button to find the backed up file on your computer. Click Restore. Do the same for the databases you saved on your computer.

4. Look over your site at the new location.

You want to see whether the site made the transfer complete without errors, so prowl around and try most if not all the pages, to see whether everything is in place. No graphics missing, or error messages, etc.

A few things to remember. Don’t try to change your username and password while you are doing this kind of transfer. You must leave everything intact, and the whole site should be in place exactly as at the old server. When you are sure it it all in order, then you can go change your password. Username - only if you can persuade your host to do that for you at their higher up admin panel.

If either your old or new host don’t have cPanel you will have to do the transfer manually. I’ve tried saving a page from the browser’s File -> Save this Page as… feature. It does a Microsoft trick, in that it saves the web page, AND with it a folder with all the graphics that belong on that page. However, when you look closer at the coding on that page you will find that the links to those graphics have all been dynamically changed to point to that extra folder - which I refer to as it’s suitcase. But on the web that page points to other folders for images, and scripts, etc.

To transfer pages manually

1. You will need to visit each and every web page, right-click on the body, and choose “View Source…” on the fly up menu. A new window opens up with the html coding of the page visible. Highlight and save all that on your computer to your usual html editor, and paste it into a blank document. Then save it to the folder in which you are putting the whole site, making sure that the page names and the directories match exactly what is on the site.

When all done your computer should end up with a mirror copy of the site as it stands on the old host’s server.

2. Now you login to the new host’s cPanel and use the File Manager to upload (especially if the domain’s DNS has not propagated yet), or if you can use ftp login that way, and upload the pages. If any pages were using java scripts, you will have to make sure they come along too, and end up in the right folders.

3. Check to make sure everything is in place; fix the errors you find.

All there? Great! You have transferred your site to a new and hopefully better host.