A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
A couple of months ago, I gave a presentation on why I thought everyone should have their own domain, even if they didn’t have a website. One of the things I stressed was taking care in choosing a web site hosting company. I told them how hard it was to change to a new web host. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that I was wrong.
I’ve been using the same web host and domain registrar for twenty years. I’m not going to name which one because I’ve obviously been satisfied with the service, up‑time stats, support, speed, accessibility, etc. I currently have three active web plans and about a dozen parked domains.
About a month ago, the hosting contract for tinys-bs.com expired. For the past year or so, I had been toying with the idea of changing to HostGator. Both of my computer clubs use the company without any problems. Why am I changing? There isn’t any specific reason, but instead a bunch of little ones. Of course, cost is always a factor. I’m not going to save a lot, but every nickel counts. HostGator also makes it much easier to use Let’s Encrypt. The internet has evolved to the point where SSL is almost mandatory.
I made the change with only one minor glitch. Before changing hosting services, I transferred my domain names. This did not go easily. I believe it was because I tried to transfer both tinys-bs.com and tinysbs.com at the same time. One change was successful and the second failed. It took about a week to get it corrected. In the future, when I move other domain names, I will only do one at a time.
I was dreading having to upload all my web site files and data. There are almost 38,000 files and more than 2GB of data. This turned out to be extremely easy. HostGator has what they call the “Migrations Department”. This assistance is used to transfer data to your new site. It is normally a paid service but was free as part of my new customer package.
I decided to give it a try and it worked easily and perfectly. It was a simple, three step operation. All I had to do was complete an on‑line form.
1. Select the Destination Hosting Package. This information was pre‑inserted into the proper areas after I selected my hosting package in a drop down box.
2. Enter Your Old Hosting Information. There were several items I had to input:
• Account Domain Name
• IP/Hostname
• Control Panel URL
• Previous Hosting Company
• Control Panel Used
• Is there an SSL Certificate?
• Account Username
• Account Password
3. Submit the Transfer Request. They said it could take up to a week to complete. I got an e‑mail three days later with a link to check that all my files had completed successfully.
After I checked everything and deleted a few things I no longer used, I was ready to shift to my new hosting service. I did this by simply logging in to my hosting panel and changing the DNS Servers to point to my new location.
I wish everything on the internet was so easy to do.
Thanks for reading.