Moving from one ISP to another without losing links.

[Charlesn]

Several months ago I was just about to upload my first Actinic site onto my Business Serve webspace, but it turned out that they don't support Actinic (something to do with 2 different versions of Apache server running at the same time. Don't bother asking me about this, I have no idea what I'm talking about! This is what Business Serve eventually told me!). With the deadline looming Actinic stepped in and helped me out by letting me upload the shop onto their web server until I could get something sorted out.

I have since received a full refund from Business Serve and have had my 2 year contract torn up. If you are unfortunate enough to have signed up with Business Serve (quite possibly the least helpful ISP on the planet) then you can get your money back if they can't host your Actinic store for you. Please feel free to use me as an example when speaking to them!

I have since signed up with Clara Net (who have been great) and want to move the shop over to our Clara webspace. The only problem is that we have some pretty deep links from search engines that we don't want to lose. Does anybody know a way to forward anyone who comes in on those links over to our Clara webspace rather than them just recieving a dead link? I wouldn't mind if it just deposited them at our home page rather than to the link they were originally expecting.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Charles

www.ahapremier.com

[I-CC]

Was the hosting provided by Actinic used under their domain name or your own one, i.e. the same domain name that is being used on the Clara servers?

If it is the same and you have not physically changed any of the page filenames within your site or its structure, then all should be fine and the search engines won't really take much notice of it now being on another server.

If however, it was under an Actinic domain name then you will have problems and you would need to speak directly with Actinic to arrange that any hits on the folder that they provided you with has a 'file not found' capture measure put in place to auto-forward those requests onto your proper domain name. But it would be upto them if they agreed etc, so if this is the case you had better speak to the person who helped you the first time with the hosting on the Actinic servers.

Hope it helps....

[Charlesn]

It was a different domain name (netlink.co.uk) so I guess I'll have to get Actinic to help. I take it by your response that what I need to do is physically possible?

[I-CC]

Yes it is more than possible, but you need Actinic to do it for you and agree to keep it there for what ever length of time until the search engines pick you up under your own domain name again.

Basically get them to create a .htaccess file within the first folder of your hosting with them.

The file should contain an error document statment along the lines of

Error Document 404 index.html

Or something like that.

Then they create the index.html page in the root folder of where they hosted your site that has a meta refresh to forward the visitor on.

From this point onwards anyone going to that folder will get the index page or if they look for a page that is no longer there, they will also get the message...

Hope it helps...

[Ian_W]

Yes it is possible - but the original server, would need to have mod rewrites put into the httpd.conf or htaccess files.

However - it is not something that you can do - as the directory in question will probably get removed by Actinic - so httpd.conf is probably the only option.

[pinbrook]

do You own the netlink domain name?

if so get it mapped to your new domain name and you should still keep your links

[zmagyar]

The server is provided by an ISP (Netlink). It is mainly used for testing purposes by our development, QA and support teams. As it is a shared web host we will not be able to do anything which involves web server configuration changes. But I'm sure the person who offered this space for you will do everything to help you in his/her sphere of infulence. So I would suggest to contact the person directly.

Regards,

[scotgold]

Business Serve do now 'support' Actinic and have done for several months. We've had our on-line store located there for some weeks. Don't expect any knowledgeable assistance on cgi, perl, scripting or Catalog from Business Serve though. Expect long periods listening to tasteless music whilst on hold. Also expect that the problem is never with Business Serve but with everyone else. This kind of makes a call to technical support fairly pointless!

Perhaps the biggest problem that we have encountered has been the FTP upload requirement that all files are lodged in a user folder called 'public_html'. This appears to be a security gateway mechanism through which all FTP uploads are filtered.

Subsequently getting the Catalog pointing and routing to cgi and perl locations has been an ongoing nightmare. It has meant had we've had to hold duplicate catalog files on the server so that the testing and pointing/rounting both work.

Any recommendations based on experience appreciated!