Switching hosts of V7 site

[paulbeckett]

Hi

I am considering switching hosts of my Actinic V7 site from Claranet to a dedicated server. I havent chosen my host yet but have a couple of good options.

If I go for a smaller host I think I will get a more supportive service but may not be able to stretch my cash far enough yet. Therefore I was also considering 1and1.

My concern is downtime during set-up as we head for the busiest period of the year.

Has anyone switch hosts? Were you able to have dual running of the sites until the new site was fully set-up and tested? Does Actinic allow this?

Kind regards

Paul
www.kjbeckett.com

[Duncan Rounding]

If it was me I would take no chances at this time of year and only consider the hosting change afterwards.

[paulbeckett]

Hi

I tend to agree. I dont think I will risk it - I think I would have done by now if I was going to. Although yesterday at 5 pm - I myself experienced very slow page loading times on my site (and I have a 10MB line).

I will just have to hold my nerve until January.

But for January the question will still apply. How have people found switching hosts and have them implemented dual running?

Paul

[AndrewPK]

we switched hosts a while back when we decided to go for a dedicated server,

when we did it, we were going from having our site on a shared server (with the name and with 1and1 and the site somewhere else, STUPID way of doing things) to actually having a dedicated server

we contacted the new hosts and they set up the server and gave us a temp domain (something like www.temphost.incredibid.co.uk) and we had to action the move with 1and1,

as soon as 1and1 released our domain name our new hosts applied that name to our server.

i have no idea how long it took to set up the server but we had the temphost working on the friday, so we actioned the release of the domain name, and the name was working on the new server when i came into work on the monday!


One last thing, our new host was nice enough to set up a tiny space on one of their shared servers with what HAD been used as our temp domain name during the setup and change with a forward to our real domain, meaning anybody who found our site using the temp space (during the change over) would not suddenly lose it. (this is one of the many reasons we like our new hosts)

SCOOP

[jont]

Although yesterday at 5 pm - I myself experienced very slow page loading times on my site (and I have a 10MB line)

CLARA were doing upgrade work to the ADSL lines yesterday afternoon (message posted on their site) ...mine also ground to an almost halt for a few hours.

[Paul Bulpit]

Twice this year

I've moved twice this year, to a smaller, one-man-band who, I think, 'rents' server space from FastHosts. The first move was to his previous provider but that couldn't cope with the traffic we were generating so we had to move again.

Each time, as above, we were given a temporary domain name, uploaded & tested. Then when the time came, the previous provider simply pointed the domain to the new name servers.

(a) We were told that it would take a little time for the internet to find the new name servers (all came right within 24 hours) and that the worst that could happen would be that if a customer was shopping at the very point when their ISP changed, their cart might empty. We stayed live for the whole time and if that happened, we didn't know about it.

(b) The biggest problem we had was with the scripts re-generating themselves, we just kept uploading the site over & over until it fixed itself.

(c) The final problem, still not resolved is with email from the Contact Us page. Another thread here says it's a host problem - the host insists that it is not. None the wiser so far, anyone shed any light?

The error message is "Error returned from SMTP server (4: : Sender address rejected: not owned by user sales@xxx.co.uk )" in mf0001.pl
which may be something to do with authorisations?

[pinbrook]

The error message is "Error returned from SMTP server (4: : Sender address rejected: not owned by user sales@xxx.co.uk )" in mf0001.pl
which may be something to do with authorisations?

My initial reaction is this is a host issue, but a preliminary check would be to tell us what email address you have in the company detail and what do you have in the SMTP in network settings

Back to the OP

The beginning of this month is probably as late as you would want to leave it re disrupting Christmas sales. But its also worth considering the extra revenue you mat acheive by being on a better platform in this busy period.

If you are on a platform that can barely deal with the traffic you want now, its only going to get worse towards the end of November. So 12 hours disruption now may be preferable to slow sales for the next 12 weeks.

If you go DS you should get your own IP address, this allows you to upload to the new space (or use a temporary domain offered by the host)

Thus once you have requested the domain transfer you take the site down from the old host and load a page that forwards to the new IP.

Thus visitors who get old DNS info get forwarded to the new site, people who get new DNS go straignht there.

Granted its a risk to move, but it may be beneficial - most short term gains involve risk.

[Paul Bulpit]

Thank you for your interest, Jo - the email address in Business Settings and in Network Setup are the same. We can send from Actinic (Order Emails) & we receive Copy Order Acknowledgements. If you use the Contact Us page you get an acknowledgement - we never receive the actual enquiry.

Looking at an email's 'Properties' the ones that work seem to use a FastHost mail server, so Actinic itself must default to that. But when we put in our own email server, it doesn't work.

[ankorr]

AndrewPK, could you tell me please what host you use? I'd say it's more than kind!!!