Help moving website to a new host.

[Markverhyden]

Sigh.... Inheriting things can be such a pain. Especially when they are old. Customer has a website on a host thats shutting down hosting. Can't log in to see things. The site is on it's 3rd or 4th "developer", the last 2-3 just winging it. Written in ancient Dreamweaver. Can't do the DNS move until we know everything is working since we can't get into the current DNS provider account which is also the host to put things back. Of course I'm far from adept at this html stuff.

So we've got new hosting setup with Network Solutions. Used Dreamweaver to upload it to the temp URL they create when the account is setup. This is the problem. Over the years the website folder on Dreamweaver is accumulated all kinds of stuff at the root. After the upload I tried URL and got nothing. So I checked and the index.html is actually in a sub folder called public, so it's htdocs/public/index.html.

So far I've not had any luck in getting the website to work. Tried putting a simlink to index.html in the htdocs, only loads part of the site. Tried some other things and either nothing or only parts of the site load. However if I point to the URL/public every works fine.

And I'm not looking for welfare here, more than happy to pay someone. Of course we're also trying to not re-invent the wheel as well. Does need to be done by the end of the month.

 

[Tech Savvy]

Can you share your htaccess file? Even if via pm, it might be something small.

Also, what’s the server OS and version?

You should be able to just copy the files within public/ to the root folder and it should just work unless they have absolute paths hard coded in. Unless there are files in the current root (parent of /public/) that they wanted to keep private?

 

[Markverhyden]

Can you share your htaccess file? Even if via pm, it might be something small.

Also, what’s the server OS and version?

You should be able to just copy the files within public/ to the root folder and it should just work unless they have absolute paths hard coded in. Unless there are files in the current root (parent of /public/) that they wanted to keep private?

Yeah, I'd totally forgotten about .htaccess so I'm looking at that now. The problem is getting the original off of the website. I'm working on that, once I have something I'll let you know. TIA.

I did try copying the public files up to root, did not work. As far as server I have no idea. Can't speak to a human. But I'm pretty sure it's a *nix and almost certainly a virtual host. Trying to find the creds and see if I may be able to ssh or sftp in.

 

[tf76]

Sounds like a pain. In previous experiences that I have dealt with, it is helpful to see what the site looked like previously.
I use this free site to do that: https://archive.org/web/

Regards,

 

[nerd2u]

You could always toss in a 301 redirect and just direct the URL to the /public for the time being

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[phaZed]

Just an idea, because it happened to me: Check on "PHP Magic Quotes" - that caused me a bunch of headaches at one time.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Dreamweaver. Oy! Might be easier to just recreate the site with a nice WordPress theme and move on. I can't believe that a Dreamweaver site would be anything more than a brochure site.

 

[Your PCMD]

Dreamweaver. Oy! Might be easier to just recreate the site with a nice Bootstrap theme and move on.

Fixed that.

Heres the thing @Markverhyden. You did not specify who made the site. Because Dreamweaver sites are made locally and stored on a local computer then uploaded via FTP, like most sites are, unless your lazy (take no offense) and just install WP off your host, in which case, thats not 100% good.

Point is, someone has to have the original code.

If you ever go WP, then do yourself a favor and get the raw WP from WP itself. Upload and extract if you have SSH credentials, otherwise, extract and upload via FTP. The problem with installing from the hosting site is that they generally always have extra "stuff" in there for tracking purposes that benefit the hosting company and not "you".

Check on "PHP Magic Quotes"

Its DW, no php.... Besides, PHP Magic Quotes has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3 and REMOVED as of PHP 5.4.

 

[phaZed]

Its DW, no php.... Besides, PHP Magic Quotes has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3 and REMOVED as of PHP 5.4.

Well, that shows you how well I'm keeping up with that! Good to know!

 

[Markverhyden]

@Your PCMD I understand how publishing software like that works. I used Rapidweaver to make mine and it's similar. Everything is on one of the iMacs. And they just push out changes from DW via it's builtin FTP client which works fine. Late last night I was able to FTP into the live site and used Filezilla to download everything. First effort was to publish the entire site as it exists in DW which did not work. Which makes me wonder what those others were doing while editing the site. The .htaccess looks pretty generic to me. From what I saw in DW it's just html, js, css and I think I saw some php as well.

DirectoryIndex index.php Index.php default.php default.htm index.htm index.html index.phtml
CaseInsensitive On

Just got back in. So I'm taking what I pulled off of the existing site and am uploading it to the virtual URL to see what happens. But I can't help but think that the current host has some other stuff going on that's out of site to me.

 

[Your PCMD]

index.html

Thats the only index file you need. All the others I bet are just a copy with various extensions. If you need any help converting, let me know.

 

[TAPtech]

Not sure what your situation is, but when I run into this stuff I just pitch a WordPress clone. My web guy can do that in no time at all, and it looks better to boot! Of course if it is a very complex site, things get heavy fast.

 

[hjelpio]

Could you pitch a WordPress conversion? Could be some extra work up front, but would be a hell of a lot easier to maintain over time. And DreamWeaver isn't a future-proof solution imho.

But I take it the client in question has shot this down before?

 

[Markverhyden]

Thats the only index file you need. All the others I bet are just a copy with various extensions. If you need any help converting, let me know.

Yeah I know there's only index file needed @Your PCMD. Just got back and loaded the contents of the public folder to a different location on my laptop and it appears to work in a browser. Earlier tests made me think that they may have mixed relative and absolute paths for file/asset location. But maybe not with this last test. I do need to call their new hosting company, Network Solutions. I'll take you up on your offer @Your PCMD and send you a link to the index to see if you see anything odd about it.

Thanks for the suggestions about WP but I'm just not one of their fans.

 

[Your PCMD]

Thanks for the suggestions about WP but I'm just not one of their fans.

Check your DM, I gave you an alternative and something that would real easy for you to do.

 

[fencepost]

You may be overthinking this. It may be as simple as a difference in the hosting, where the old host expects things to be in "public" and the new host expects them in "htdocs". Combine the two and you get htdocs/public and nothing can be found. If the source has a bunch of stuff with absolute URLs instead of relative ones that's going to be a headache to fix, which is where .htaccess games might come in.

Where I have stuff hosted it goes in the "public_html" folder but there's also a "www" symlink to that location. Because the root of the account is outside the public_html folder there's no chance of someone being able to directly download a sensitive file (e.g. wp-config.php).

 

[Markverhyden]

What a mess this was, glad it's almost over. Ended up just deleting the .htaccess file, tested the public folder contents on a AWS VM I spun up. Worked 99% so I told them we're moving it over. Their web "developer" can clean up the rest. Most important is I cleaned up the folder Dreamweaver was using so there was only one set of files. Just need to get DW's ftp working now but he can use Network Solutions built in file manager to update the site in the mean time.

Thanks for everyone's comments.