How I Rebuilt My 5000-Page Site in Two Days

There were two serious reasons why I transferred my photography hobby web site from one web hosting provider to another. First, it was vandalized by a hacker from another country, which means the provider’s servers were not secured. Second, it was too expensive to maintain it at $39.95 per month, when I could have it in another provider at $5.95 per month with more space for my web pages. Currently, this web site provider offers $3.88/month with unlimited disk space and unlimited data transfer.

At first, I was hesitant to move the site to another provider since the site had been built by me little by little since 1999. I’m just a hobbyist in photography, and a basic web designer doing these things on my spare times. So, what I did first was to download all the folders and files from my web site to my hard drive. I downloaded them in one folder, so that all the folders and files will not be mixed-up with the other folders and files in my c: drive. Once I finished downloading all the folders and files, I made copy of them in a CD. This procedure will make my files backed-up safely in a CD even if my computer crashes.

Once all the files were downloaded to my hard drive and backed-up in a CD, I emailed my old web hosting provider about my decision to close my web site account immediately. Then, I opened a new account in another web hosting provider. This time, building web site from this new provider was even easier, because they have personalized control panel, which hastens management of my web site. The control panel have file manager where I only click every feature I needed in my new web site. By simply answering the wizard, or filling-up blank textboxes, the configurations which I supposed to do manually were done so easily in the control panel. The database file locations for the CGI scripts and MySQL database folders were done by the wizard, too. Additional features like blogging, FTP site, web mail, shopping central, newsletter are all done by wizard. Collaboration web site builder, like Joomla and PHP Nuke were also included in the package of this web provider. Plus, it has programs for building shopping mall in your web site. In spite of these tremendous added features that are for advanced web designers, I was surprised I could configure them easily. It’s really amazing, even an elementary student can build a web site in this provider.

Once all the features I needed were done, I went to the web site of my domain’s Name Registrar and changed the two DNS records or the name servers that will point to the location of my new web site. While waiting for the twelve hours for my new web site location to be propagated worldwide by these domain name servers, I started uploading my backed-up old folders and files to the new web provider’s server using FTP or file transfer software. I felt sleepy already when it was almost 1:00 o’clock in the morning, So, I decided to highlight all the remaining folders to be uploaded from c: drive, and let the FTP software transfer them while I was sleeping. This move was just a gamble on me – a try if the FTP software could transfer all my files non-stop the whole night without my intervention. Luckily, when I woke-up at 6:30 in the morning, the whole upload just finished when I was stepping towards my computer. I knew it because of the sound alarm created by the FTP software everytime it completes uploading a file or group of files.

My uploading of old files to the new web provider’s server was just for purposes of making my web site viewable and explorable with no long hours of gap from one provider to another provider. The old files have old links and non-existent advertisers that I may still be promoting in my pages. And as I’ve said, some of these files or web pages were vandalized by a hacker. So, my real building or re-building of my 5,000-page web site for photography was just starting that morning.

With the help of a software called Arles Image Web Page Creator for creating photo albums, I was able to recreate pages with new looks and with new inserted advertisers which could provide an income to this hobby web site. The software provides a user with textboxes to fill-up, then the html files are done by it. It’s really very easy to use that I was able to rebuild my web site composing of 5,000 plus pages of photographs – pages which I slowly built for nine years from my spare times – which I finished redesigning them in two day!

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