Do you have what it takes…to move your website?

As a website owner, at some point and for whatever reason, you may come across a need to move your website from your existing web developer, designer, or hosting provider.  It is up to you to supply your new service provider with all necessary files and data.  Gaining all the information necessary for the move to occur quickly and successfully may become your biggest challenge if you’re not prepared.  Ensuring that you have the following documents on file is important for such an occasion.

1. Domain name:

• Have the name of the company with whom you registered, your website address, including your domain name(s), username, and password for accessing the domain name manager.
• Ensure the administrative, billing, and technical contact information is correct in WHOIS.  Note that the registrant / administrative contact is the official owner of the domain name.  If you have WHOIS Privacy enabled, this will hide the official information to stop unsolicited advertising.  In this case you would need to contact your registrar or log in to your domain name manager to see the contact information.
• If you own a dot-ca, you should also have CIRA’s (the governing body of this extension) account number and password.

2. Website hosting:

• Know who your hosting company is, their contact information, including support related contacts.  If you are hosting your website internally, include who is responsible for maintaining it.
• Determine if the same contact controls both website and email.
• Get FTP username and password, including hostname. You will need these to access the website files on your server.
• If your website is using a database, document the database type, name, hostname, username, and password.

3. Website files:

• If another company designed your website, they may provide you with the creative source files.  Your website may have been designed in Photoshop, for example.
• Get a hold of the FLA files of any flash work done. These are the source flash files used to make changes.
• Obtain any original video or audio files.
• Depending on the programming language used to program your website, you will have access to most of the code from FTP. Otherwise, in all but the rarest situations, the uncompiled source will be enough for projects coded in dot-NET for example.

Don’t wait till the last minute to get this information.  For many of our clients, their website is their advantage for business success.  Keep track of all your records in the event of an emergency, or when you may need to move the site, hire a new web solutions firm, or replace an employee. If you’re organized and prepared, this information will be a website saver.

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Comments

• Nice article, wish evryone bulting a website knew how important is to have control of your website.

  Well i run a cyprus web design company and only recently i came up with a situation where the developer of another website move abroad and they are making it dead hard to get hold of all the information of the client’s website to move it to our servers. We only wanted to do little chnages here and there in the website and the previous developers did not give any details out, they said “fine since you dont want our services any more, here are the files, setup the website somewhere else and do what you need” needless to say that we have sne 10 emails, and made 20 call abroad and still we do not have a complete st of files/database and a domain under our control. its becoming very frustrading.

  Comment by Paris Paraskeva — February 20th, 2008