Complete migration to Dreamhost

Hello, all,

So as a relatively new hire at my job with a lot of responsibilities to update procedures and overall image, I've been included in a lot of e-mails back and forth between the various parts of the small business that I work for.

It's kind of a long story, but bear with me if you will. I was CC'd on an e-mail my boss sent to our current web hosting company regarding the website, and the guy at the other end replied that he will be charging us $500 for a year's worth of hosting -- "including two months free!" -- 6 gB of server space and 180 gB bandwidth per month (no additional services to speak of).

Obviously, my jaw dropped to the floor when I heard this. It turns out that no one in the office knows anything about hosting, so the company was making a killing off of us and the previous managers' inexperience. I talked to the owner and suggested DreamHost as a way to save money, have a whole lot more space for backing up company data, and create a better web presence.

She was thrilled with the idea and put me in charge of getting rid of the previous hosting company and making the move to DreamHost. Okay, now here's the predicament! I have very little experience in migrating domains -- including e-mail and content -- to a new hosting provider. If I can take care of this all at once on a weekend day while e-mail traffic is nonexistent, that is way preferable to taking the whole company off of e-mail for a while during the work week.

So I guess my question is -- what's the procedure for moving entire web content and e-mail systems to a new host? I want to move the domain to DreamHost, and if it's absolutely necessary, I suppose I can just set up new e-mail addresses on DreamHost once the domain has been migrated.

I'm obviously not experienced in this, so if there's any info you can direct me to, I'd really appreciate it.

Rich

you may want to refer to some articles in wiki http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/KB_/_Domains_/_Transfers_/_Transfer_Hosting

I'll suggest you to have your account in DH activated first before you transfer. It takes some time for new account to activated.

The first thing I would suggest is a *thorough* reading through the "getting started" section of the DH wiki, and then working through the subjects you have just mentioned. After doing that, when/if you have specific questions, someone here is very likely to be able to provide some help.

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the guy at the other end replied that he will be charging us $500 for a year's worth of hosting -- "including two months free!" -- 6 gB of server space and 180 gB bandwidth per month (no additional services to speak of)...Obviously, my jaw dropped to the floor when I heard this. It turns out that no one in the office knows anything about hosting, so the company was making a killing off of us and the previous managers' inexperience.

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I just *must* make a comment here about that section of your post.

It might not be really "fair" to refer to that "previous hosting guy's" arrangement as "making a killing" as a result of another's inexperience. For *many* "business people", who are not "saavy" with internet related stuff, such an arrangement is rather common, and really shouldn't be evaluated in terms of bandwidth/storage metrics.

$500.00 a year breaks down to $41.66 a month, or $9.58 a week, which is a completely insignificant expense for a business in exchange for "problem free" hosting of a website (and managing of email, backups, admin duties, etc.). Even if a business has someone in their employ who can handle all these things for them, it is very easy for the cost of that person's time to handle such things to greatly exceed such a fee (unless that person is making a buck an hour!).

Such an employee's time spent on "managing the webhosting" also is time *not* spent on other business related tasks, which increases the cost to a business even more.

Sure, on the face of it, that arrangement was "a lot more expensive" than what one can get with a Dreamhost account - but that does not necessarily mean such an arrangement is a "bad deal" for a business. For those of us who are interested in such technologies, and have the time and resources to "diddle around" with such things ourselves, Dreamhost is a great deal; for a business that doesn't want such things to become a regular function of an employee, the other arrangement may actually be a much better business decision.

At any rate, welcome to Dreamhost and good luck with your migration. The wiki, and the internet in general, is a great resource for planning such a move with lot's of information available. Don't forget to allow time for DNS updates to take place, and I suggest you completely "stage" your site(s) *before* initiating DNS changes (the wiki has lot's of info on that, and so do many previous threads in these Forums).

--rlparker

Slow and steady wins the race on these kinds of changes. And you generally only get one chance to swap the whole company without a huge amount of complaint.

Wholly

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And you generally only get one chance to swap the whole company without a huge amount of complaint.

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That is a particularly good observation! If you botch such a move, the fallout will be hugh, so it is a lot wiser to go very methodically and deliberately through each step to avoid the "OMG! Stuff is broke" hysteria that can happen if you try to "rush" any aspect of it.

--rlparker