Moving Site from Googlepages to a New Hosting Provider

I'm doing an experiment in moving a web site from Googlepages to another hosting provider. There are different issues coming up during process. Here I will write down the problems encountered and provide some solutions I come up with.

 

One of the first issues to appear is how to redirect old links and search engines to index that new site instead of the old one.

The approaches and solutions are covered in a separate post.

 

Another issue is how to deploy the new web site. FTP protocol gets blocked at certain locations which makes it difficult to deploy the changes to the web site. Googlepages offers (only) web access to files. That means the access is always available through a web browser. This is its drawback at the same time if you have FTP protocol enabled.

Fortunately, most providers nowadays offer some sort of HTTP access to files on the server. That means no automatic synchronization of files but you have to deploy each changed file manually.

Host “110mb” allows a nice feature where all the changed files can be uploaded as a zip file and then this zip file can be uncompressed on the server, effectively deploying all the changed files at once. This option also overwrites existing files as opposed to manually uploading single files, having to delete previous version before upload. Neat!