Moving your site

Follow these easy steps to transfer your site to Rustikat Internet Services, and you should experience no downtime whatsoever. Your visitors won't even know anything has happened! First thing to do? Sign up for your new account! Once you've completed your order, it can take anywhere between 5 minutes to 12 hours for your account to be set up; it depends on the load of orders we're receiving on the day. Once it's ready, you will receive a welcome email telling you most of what you need to know, including your log-in information and the nameservers to use for your domain. Ensure that you have a full, up-to-date working copy of your website files, databases and scripts stored on your computer. Download or record any email address settings, passwords, log file/statistic reports, and anything else you might need from your current host. If you're using scripts on your site, update any server-specific settings they contain, such as the path to Perl or sendmail, the server path to your files, etc. You can find this information by selecting your server type from our Support section. Upload your website files to your new account. This can be done by using the server IP as the FTP host address, rather than the domain name. You will find the server IP in your welcome email. You will not yet be able to use ftp.yourdomain.com, as the domain will still be pointing to your old host. Log into your website control panel using the server IP as follows: http://server.IP/cpanel. Use your FTP username and password. From there you can set up your email addresses, MySQL databases, subdomains and any site settings. You can pre-view your website prior to updating your domain name by using the server IP as well, so that you can ensure it is fully functional before it goes live. Your preview URL will be in the format of http://server.IP/~username/. In particular, make sure any scripts are working correctly. Once your website data, settings and email accounts have been transferred to Rustikat Internet Services, you can safely update your domain to point to it. Log in to your domain registrar and look for a section called "Update DNS info" or "Nameservers," or something similar. This is where you need to enter the nameservers given in your welcome email. Make sure you delete the old nameservers as well, or your domain won't know where to point! After you've put in the new nameservers and saved the information, you'll have to wait a while for the changes to take effect. It will take somewhere between 24-72 hours for the new DNS info to be updated all over the world. This is called propagation. Once your domain has propogated, your website and email at Rustikat Internet Services will be accessible via the domain name. As propagation doesn't happen all at once, but at some ISPs earlier than others, while a domain is propagating to a new host some visitors and email will be sent to the new server while some will still be sent to the old server. Before closing your old hosting account, you will probably want to collect any data that has ended up on that server during propagation instead of the new server, such as email and database entries, if your site is dynamic (i.e. if it has a forum or guestbook). To do so, you should be able to connect to your old server IP or hostname. If you're not sure about this, you'll need to contact your old host and ask them about it. There is a chance they will not have a method of connecting to the server other than the domain name, if this is the case you may lose some information during the transfer. After you're sure propagation is complete, and you have collected any email and data from the old server, you can safely close your old hosting account. If you have any problems or questions, please don't hesitate to contact our technical support department. That's what they're there for!