Site migration
For some times, I had to migrate my website and to change my web-site hosting provider. You can find below some information concerning this migration.
Original post in my weblog
Printable version (pdf)
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: 24x7, 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. This code is so defined:
"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!
