Question about web hosting....

The company I work for is VERY unhappy with the service from our web site host. Honestly, a teeny tiny bit of this is our fault, but mostly theirs. Without getting in to details as to why, but we want to change hosts w/o having to change the entire site (though, IMO, we should change the entire site but that's not my call). We just want the site as it was moved to a new hosting company. How? I have no experience and very little knowledge about the whole hosting process....

Here's a bit of back story: we had the same host for 7+ years. In the past 3 years or so, we set up sites through our host for customers so each customer had their own site and therefore was responsible for the billing. We made this clear to our hosting company: we said that we would pay for the 1st month of hosting as part of the initial site design & setup fee that we made with the customer, after the 1st month, the customer was required to pay for the hosting or the site would be turned off. We gave the hosting company all billing details for each customer (there weren't many, maybe 8 or 10 total in the past 2-3 years; we don't specialize in web design or hosting; it's a "side service" we provide). However, the company took it upon themselves to bill US for each customer. After the 1st month had past, they billed us for 1 year hosting for each customer. My boss is a bit flakey when it comes to actually looking at his bills, he just pays 'em, but when he saw that he owed over $2000 to the hosting company, he called and they explained that we have been paying for "site A" and "site B" and "site C" etc. So, upon refusal to pay for all these other sites, even though they admitted to having the billing details for these sites but "wondered why we have all this information" (that's what they said), they turned off all the sites including ours. This is the proverbial straw on the proverbial camel's back; they have messed up our site/account MANY times.

Bored yet? :cry So I need to know how we get everything moved from "host A" to "host B". We may or may not have the original site "build" stored on a hard drive or on CDs/DVDs somewhere (I know it was built with DreamWeaver about 7 years ago), but knowing how flakey my boss is, combined with the MUCH higher flake ratio of the original site designer, I doubt we can find it.....

 

Should be fairly simple - just find the new hosting service you wish to do business with, and follow any domain name transfer protocols that are in place.

The process is usually painless - involves a couple of e-mails with releasing/unlocking authorizations, and pay attention to any time references (you usually have 'x' number of days in which the transfer should take place - if the limit is exceeded, you'll have to restart the process).

Once you get the new domain established, just FTP your old site to the new service.

 

This may be your biggest headache now. If you don't have it, the only other way to get it would be to download it from the hosting service, and that possibility is rather doubtful since they closed your account. But, hey, looking on the bright side of things, this may the time for that re-design you'd like to see. In other words, the company's site will have to be re-built from scratch if the files for the original site can't be located or retrieved.

When looking for a new hosting service, you might want to find one that bills on a monthly basis, with an option to pay annually or some other frequency other than monthly. Also, I think I'd be inclined to handle the billing for the web customers of your company from the hosting service and then your company bill the web customers. And, I'd bill the web customers more than what it's costing you so that you cover administrative costs for doing this plus a bit of profit for providing the billing service; just a suggestion.