I have switched web hosting, but lost my website?

Question

I have switched to fatcow web hosting, which is supposed to be one of the best. However, my website is all wrong.

At first it would not come up at all with some kind of error message. When I gave the support team the ripped version that I had put on my computer, they managed to retrieve the text, but only 2% of pictures appeared - (while this service is costing me $75 extra per hour).

They have all my picture files and pages and everything, but they can't seem to be able to set it up right. Funny thing, when I was signing up with them, they made all kind of promises that both web hosting companies were compatible (and the type of website setup I had), and that it could switch over without seamlessly.

Any advice?

Answer 1

Your problem is that you did not save an EXACT MIRROR of all files and images using the exact same directory structure you had online on the other hosting site. I keep mine on a thumbdrive and only have to upload the entire directory structure to the public_html (root) directory of any new host.



You should be able to do the same using FTP, but only if you have the exact files used. If you did a save Web Page, Complete for your site, then all paths are wrong and many images probably were not picked up.



Obviously, no one has a clue about what the HTML looks like at this point, nor how to fix it. Is your old site still online? If so, the files and images can still be recovered properly.



Ron

Answer 2

We'd probably need more information. If you had a copy of your site and the new host was compatible with the technology used in your original site then there is no obvious reason for errors.

If you could be specific about the error that you got then it may give more clues as to what went wrong.

Do you have access to the server that hosts your site i.e. can you load the site yourself (ftp)?

You also talk about a 'ripped' version. What do you mean? Was it a full copy of all the files?

Why could they only 'retrieve' certain things, like text etc? What format were the files that you gave them?

Answer 3

Sounds to me like they expected you to have saved a copy of your Web site to your hard drive, so you could upload it to the new hose BEFORE cancelling your old Web hosting. That's pretty much the standard operating procedure when changing hosts.



The only advice I would offer is if you don't have a copy of your Web site on your computer, visit http://www.archive.com and see if your site is there, you may be able to get some of the images back.

Answer 4

I have some suggestions below, but there a lot of things that could cause this depending on your site. Espcially ifyou're using a server side scripting language.



Like is this a pure HTML site or does it use server side scripting like PHP or ASP?



Do you know if the HTML ( or Server Side Scripting generated HTML)used relative paths when calling things like your images and links or absolute paths. For example, for good portability you cant to set an image tag like this.



not like



if you're site was programed with the latter example you'll have to do a fine and replace on all your code to remove the domain portion.



If your site does use relative paths make sure your directory structure on the server is the same. Maybe it got changes with the files were uploaded to the new server.



Also if one of the pervious posters was right and you simply download the site through your browsers, that's really not good. Contact your old host ASAP and see if they still have your files. You'll probably have to pay them to restore them from a backup.



The proper way to transfer your site is either through FTP or downloading a full back up of the site through your webhosting control pannel.



Good luck.

Answer 5

"I gave the support team the ripped version that I had put on my computer"



You mean you saved the pages from a web browser and upload that? Oh dear!



If that's the case, you'll need the original files. All the paths will be wrong, and the problem isn't with the host. It'll be the way you've saved them.

Answer 6

What they said was probably correct; after all, web pages use the same code (html). The problem is probably down to the file structure on their server. For example they may have simply put your images in a subfolder (like /images) whereas on your last server they may have been sitting in the same folder as the web pages. This means that any code looking for the images will need tweaking to include the proper file path.

Answer 7

If you JUST switched over, it could be DNS issues. Give your domain 48 hours to go back to normal. If you find errors after that, then I'd start getting worried. Usually once you switch web hosting it can take a good couple of days for everything to return to normal. That's normal.