Website woes.
 

I've had a website hosted by Weebly/Square for about 3 years, and I think a change is needed (urgently!)

Anyone with any suggestions, as to who I could go to. I'd like a fairly simple building system, to go with the fairly simple website owner.

Any help gratefully recieved.

I've been with Ecohosting for over 3 years without a problem. Never used their website builders but either one seems simple enough.

Can you download the files from your current host? The easiest way to transfer a site is just to download the files and upload to a new host server. No need to build things all over again. If you have used some sort of builder that is linked to the host, it should still create the basic HTML files and such. If it is some sort of Content Management System (CMS) it may be a bit more convoluted, but should still be possible.

Thanks for the replies, I like the look of echohosting. Hopefully simple enough even for me.

As to downloading the website, it has a function to email a zip file of the whole site. Sadly I've tried it on multiple occasions, and it has never worked.

It has been downloaded by the wayback machine website, is this of any use ?

If you want to create a site that looks the same then it'll help with the page layout and act as a reminder of what needs to be on it, but it won't help implement the functionality. If there's any server side processing involved then that stays on the server.

If you have a very static site then you might be in luck.

Right click on a page & view page source, is what you see something that you would want to copy & paste into a text editor? You would also have to download every linked to file & possibly rewrite each link in each page when uploading to a new server. Probably easier to start again using the old website as a template. Ecohosting will give you an FTP account so you can download the entire website directory at will.

Your current website host should also have provided you with FTP access, the login may be the same as what you use to get into the website builder, or you may be able to set it to something specific in the control panel. I have just had a look at your site, it looks good but beneath the skin there is a lot of extraneous code that has been stuffed in there by the website building software. You've got an extensive site... it would be a lot of work to reconstruct everything. If you can get some cooperation from the current host's helpdesk, get them to figure out how to allow FTP access and use that to download the complete contents of the public_html folder (or whatever it is named on their system, the helpdesk should know). Getting the system to e-mail you a zip file most likely fails because the resulting file is way too large to fit in an e-mail.

The Wayback archive can't help you here, only as a reference as to 'this is how it should look' as netstruggler mentioned. Ideally, you should rebuild the site with another website builder (or something like Dreamweaver or equivalent) so that all the extra code is removed as it only serves to slow things down and keep Google in business. But that's just my view.

AFAIK Weebly does not routinely allow FTP access.

I had a quick look around on Google and you're right, there is no FTP access which is a pain in this particular situation. Can you download the website any other way? The e-mail option probably fails because of the size, but is there a download option as well? If you can get the structure of the site (the HTML files, CSS and images) on your computer, you've got the basis to get it back up and running on another host quickly.

The 'wget' programme 'should' download all available files from the site, which might save a lot of time.

It's a Linux programme. It's possible, though not trivial, to run it under Windows.

Tom's Hardware is one of the more trustworthy sites to turn to for information.



N

Huge thanks to those who have replied. I'm going to study these and will get back to you with more idiotic questions on my return next week.

Thanks again.

Lossy

https://archivarix.com/

​​​​​​​...this any help?

A huge help, thanks.
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Another possible option: I changed hosting companies recently and they (the new hoster) offered a migration service; they would get the website from the old hoster; I assume by getting site files transferred.

This is a tempting thought. Has anyone here had dealings with Hostinger ? They seem pretty good value.

Continued thanks for all the help.

Hostinger - been with them just over a year. Reasonable support and reliability. HOWEVER, I lost a lot of emails early on as the email system at Hostinger (Mailchannels) is set to work via webmail and puts all mail IT judges as spam into a spam folder in webmail, so if you, like me, use an email client and not webmail be aware that you need to place filters on your Mailchannels domains so that ALL mail is sent by it to your own spam filtering client, or it may (and did!) 'eat' non-spam emails without telling you. It is a bit of a pain, but works.

Also be aware that renewal prices are a 'chunk' more than the 'initial' prices.

"Also be aware that renewal prices are a 'chunk' more than the 'initial' prices."

Life in a nutshell!

It's a shame they haven't got a try before you buy feature.