This article gives you an overview of what you need to do to either move your site hosting to us or to create a new web site with us.

Contact Us

Firstly please contact us via our Join enquiry form to discuss your requirements. We will contact you and discuss your requirements.

Once we are all happy, the Administrators will ask you to register and then set up a new hosting account for your site.

If a new web site is being created then we will need to agree with you

• The domain name of the new web site e.g. ramblers-webs.org.uk
• The owner or registrar of the site, this can either be
  
  • Ramblers Association - Name of Group or Area, plus the contact details of the owner, the name, address, email and telephone number of someone on the Area/Group committee to own the site
  • or we can register the domain to Central Office

If you have an existing site then we expect that the domain will be transferred to our host.

Registering with us

We will then ask you to register on this site and YOU MUST visit the site and subscribe to the appropriate categories of the site Forum. In particular you must subscribe to the Important Announcements category, this category enables us to contact you about changes to the system.

This will enable us to keep in touch with you, notify you of any issues and for you to get support, via the forum, from other web masters

Setting up your new Hosting Account

Once you have registered we will create your new hosting account.

If you are having a new web site we will register the new domain name with the details you supply

If you are transferring your existing domain name to us we will set the account to accept this. The domain name is transferred to the new account once you are happy with the new site. Once transferred the new site becomes live and the old site is not normally accessible to the public.

Hosting Account Panel (HCP)

Once this is up and running we will supply you with your password so you can access your Hosting Control Panel (HCP)

Note that if you are transferring your site there will be a "Temp Web Address" for your site so you can transfer and test your site prior to the domain name being transferred.

The "Temp Web Address" is displayed as a link in the HCP in the right hand side panel.

Transferring your Site

Until your domain name has been transferred it is easiest not to use the FTP facilities.

The easiest way of transferring an HTML based web site it ZIP the site into a single file. Then upload the file using the HCP File Manager. Once this file is uploaded it can be unzipped by right clicking on the file name and selecting unzip.

Recommended File Structure

We recommend that you store your site in a sub folder rather than in the root folder (public_html). The reason for this is that when you come to want to design a new version of the site this can be down more easily.

We recommend having a folder www01 for the first version of your site , www02 for the second etc.

This is particularly important for a Joomla site as renaming its folders can cause problems if not done everywhere.

Setting up a Joomla Site

We have a "starter for 10" Joomla site that we can install in your domain for you . You can then customise this web site to your own requirements. Note that www.ramblers-webs.org.uk is based on this.

The "starter for 10" site is at https://starterj5.theramblers.org.uk/

Setup Emails

You will need to transfer any email accounts or forwards to your new account.

If you have any other facilities (e.g. MySQL) these will also need transferring

Testing

Test your site to make sure all is well

Once the new site is working

When you are happy that the new site can go live then contact us.

If you are transferring your domain name you will need to get your old host to change the IPSTag to move it to our host. The Administrators will tell you what value it should have.

Support

Once you are up and running either get support from other web masters via our forum or take out a Support Ticket to get Administrator help.