BLOG: site migration almost finished

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So, after having invested some hours in my hosting migration, I am almost finished :-)

I must say, I was completely unprepared for this move, let me sumarize the steps. Could be useful for some of you ;-)

Choice of a new web-hosting provider

My site and weblog were hosted before by free.fr, which is, as indicated in the name, a free hosting provider, linked, logically, with limited possibilities. I decided to move to OVH, a quite well-known web-site hosting provider in France. The solution I choose is the 240GP PLAN. This package costs 65& euro; (incl. VAT) per year for the following characteristics:

  • shared hosting

  • operating system: Linux

  • guaranteed availibility: 24×7, 99.9%

  • OVH’s bandwidth: 1 GB

  • disk space: 240 MB

  • unlimited traffic (data volume)

  • maximum number of daily hits: 45 000

  • Perl, C, Python and PHP (v4.3.6) supported

  • private FTP access

  • statistics: access to the raw web logs, Urchin

  • POP/IMAP accounts (25 MB per account and 10 MB per email limit): 8 Emails

  • webmail access

  • SMTP server

  • MySQL database: 1

  • maximum number of simultaneous connections: 3

  • unlimited disk space for SQL data

  • disk space occupied by the MySQL bases, POP/IMAP accounts and logs files is not counted in the quota of disk space allocated

  • domain names not included

The transfert process

I decided to move the entire web site “as-it-is”, with exactly the same structure. So, with a FTP transfert and the new definition in the DNS (duration of the propagation: about 24 hours in my case), I was mainly done (with few changes in some URLs).

I had then to change quite a lot of options in blogger. The FTP directory changes were specially annoying….

Google & Page Ranking, search engines

After having searched information for such kind of transfer case (no domain change, hosting/DNS move, same web-site structure), I opted for redirections commands in the .htaccess file by free.fr. Free.fr allows very limited possibilities (no URL rewriting) in this field. The .htaccess file looks like:

redirect 301 /home.htm http://www.didierbeck.com/home.htm

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.didierbeck.com/index.html

redirect 301 /about_me.htm http://www.didierbeck.com/about_me.htm

…..

The “301” code tells the search engine (as the browsers ;-) that the requested resource has been permanently moved.

“The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.”

Generally speaking, URL-rewriting is ok, as redirection in the .htaccess file or in a PHP header. As usual, javascript and META tag should be avoided!

Let’s see in a few weeks if this method actually worked efficiently :-)

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