Web Hosting And Domain Registration
As I mentioned in a previous entry (Farewell To Hermon), I'm going to be moving my software website (Virtu Software) to a new hosting service this month.What I didn't mention was that I'm also going to be transferring my domain registration to the same company that'll be hosting my website. I think this is going to be my big stress for the month of May. I know, that's pretty sad, if my biggest stress in life is getting a website transferred.
But, I'm not entirely sure how it's going to work out. I've already purchased the hosting plan I'm going to use, but in order to set up the hosting plan, I need to provide a domain name. Hmmm. Well, I can't give it "virtu-software.com" because that domain is already pointing to my old site.
Isn't this some sort of catch-22? I can't transfer the site until I have someplace to transfer it to, and I can't have someplace to transfer it to, until I've set up the site, but I can't set up the site until I have a domain assigned to it...
Well, I just got an answer back from my new hosting service. I was right...I can't set up the hosting plan without providing the domain name that'll be associated with it. And, I have to provide the domain name I want associated with that hosting account for the long haul. Which disappoints my hope...I was hoping to temporarily assign another domain name to the account, in order to do some testing, and then when everything seems to be good, unassign that domain and do my domain name transfer. But they say:
Quote:
| Once a hosting account has been associated with a domain name it can not be changed. You may associate this hosting account with the correct domain and access the domain through FTP and the IP address of the hosting account. You could also test the site to make sure it was working before changing the name servers on the domain. |
In other words, assign the domain name virtu-software.com, even though that domain name is currently pointing elsewhere, then use the IP address of the site when I do my testing.
*sigh*
Problem with this is, the formation of the address is different than it'll be once the domain name is pointing to that site; then the address of the site will be: http://www.virtu-software.com/. Right now it is http://999.999.999.999/virtusoftware/ (where the 9's and dots represent the IP address of my site)
Why is that a problem? Because the root directory is not my site. It's the server root. So if I refer to a directory like this: "/images/", on the existing site that means "http://www.virtu-software.com/images/", but on the new site it means "http://999.999.999.999/images/", which is a non-existent directory.
So what to do? Well, I'm adding in the following snippet of code temporarily to help deal with this issue:
if instr(1,Request.ServerVariables("URL"),"/virtusoftware/") > 0 then
RootString="/virtusoftware/"
else
RootString="/"
end if
Then whenever I have absolute path references in my pages, I add in the root string. Thus /images/ becomes: RootString & "/images/".
Is it all going to work out? I dunno. Stay tuned, because I'm sure I'll be gabbing some more about this site transfer as the month goes along...
Posted On May 2, 2005 at 10:58 AM
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