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What you will need:

• Your GreenGeeks service server IP. You can find this by contacting support to confirm the correct IP address you’ll need to use.

Using a Redirection Service for Testing

The instructions in this tutorial involve editing the hosts file on your local computer. As an alternative, you can use a redirection service that creates a proxy connection to the new server, like SkipDNS.

One of the advantages of using such a service is you can share the proxy URL with a client or a team, so they can view the website on the new server without editing the hosts file on their computer.

If you don’t need to share updates with others, you may find that editing the hosts file is quicker and easier than using a proxy.

Redirecting via System hosts File

The examples here use the Windows operating system. For Linux and macOS instructions, scroll down to the “Linux and macOS users” section.

The best way to test your website is by staging your domain via your computer system’s hosts file. This method avoids having to wait for DNS propagation which could take quite a while.

However, this will only work for the local system. If someone else would like to test the site, they will need to follow the same steps for modifying the hosts file.

Open your text editor of choice. If you’re a Windows user, use Notepad with administrative privileges to modify the hosts file.

• Open Windows menu (click Windows icon or use Windows keyboard key)
• Type “Notepad”
• Right-click “Notepad”
• From the pop-up menu, select “Run as Administrator”

Open your system’s hosts file. The location of the file is:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

If you don’t see anything in the etc folder, change “Text Documents” to “All Files” in Notepad. This will show everything in the folder including the hosts file.

Using your GreenGeeks server IP, add the following lines to the file on a new line at the bottom of the hosts file:

SERVER_IP_HERE ggexample.com
SERVER_IP_HERE www.ggexample.com

Note that SERVER_IP_HERE needs to be replaced with your actual server IP address. The ggexample.com references should be replaced with your actual domain name.

Here is an example of what your entry should look like:

13.57.24.68 ggexample.com
13.57.24.68 www.ggexample.com

Go to File and Save the hosts file. You don’t want to use “Save As” because you’re keeping the hosts file as-is with your added redirect entry.

Restart your web browser and navigate to your website. The site will now load from the GreenGeeks server.

Linux and macOS users

For Linux and macOS users, the location of the hosts file is:

/etc/hosts

You have to make changes to the hosts file as a superuser.

macOS

• Click the F4 key to access launcher
• Enter terminal in the search field
• Click the Terminal icon

To open the hosts file with Nano as a superuser, use the following command:

sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

Since you are executing a command as a superuser, macOS will ask for the password for your Mac user account. Enter your password and click the ENTER key.

Add these lines to the bottom of the hosts file:

SERVER_IP_HERE ggexample.com
SERVER_IP_HERE www.ggexample.com

Replace SERVER_IP_HERE with your server IP address and replace ggexample.com with your domain name.

Your entry should look like:

12.34.56.78 ggexample.com
12.34.56.78 www.ggexample.com

When you are finished editing hosts file:

• Click CTRL + X on your keyboard
• Enter Y to save changes
• Click the ENTER key

Linux

To edit with the Nano text editor, use the command:

$ sudo nano /etc/hosts

or to edit with the gedit text editor:

$ sudo gedit /etc/hosts

Add these lines to the bottom of the hosts file:

SERVER_IP_HERE ggexample.com
SERVER_IP_HERE www.ggexample.com

Replace SERVER_IP_HERE with your server IP address and replace ggexample.com with your domain name.

Your entry should look like:

12.34.56.78 ggexample.com
12.34.56.78 www.ggexample.com

Save the changes by clicking ctrl+X on your keyboard.

Removing the Redirect Entry

To revert this change, simply remove the lines you added and save the file again. This will direct the site back to the original host. You may need to do this before visiting your domain registrar to change the nameserver.

The post How Can I Test My Website Before Switching DNS? appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

In the early days of commercial website hosting, a typical plan often provided around 25 megabytes of storage space. While that may seem hard to believe now, those early space limitations led a lot of us to be concerned with how much disk space our websites used.

Disk storage space isn’t usually an issue anymore since GreenGeeks and many other hosts offer accounts with unlimited storage space. But if you have the need to determine storage space requirements for your website, there are some things to consider.

Disk Space and Bandwidth

The first thing to remember is disk space and bandwidth are not the same things. Disk space is file storage space, and bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred from your website to visitors. So when we talk about disk space, that number remains the same whether ten or ten thousand visitors access it.

Email, Logs, and Databases All Count

When calculating the disk space your account uses, you have to look beyond the /public_html directory where your uploaded website files live. If you make an FTP connection to your account and go up one level from /public_html, you’ll be in your home directory, and you can see there are a lot of things taking up space there. Application configuration files, logs, email – it all adds up. Your databases don’t live in your home directory, but their disk space usage also counts toward your overall storage usage.

Disk Space for Video and Audio

While it may tempting to load your latest album or feature-length video up to your “unlimited storage space” website, it’s almost always better to use a dedicated platform for those kinds of large downloads or streaming files. Not that your website isn’t capable of serving up those kinds of files, it is. But YouTube or Vimeo can serve your video more efficiently than any website host, and they make it easy to embed the videos on the website pages that are served from your host.

The same thing applies to audio, whether it’s music or a podcast. You certainly could serve the files directly from your website, but sites like Bandcamp or Soundcloud have great built-in players and infrastructures that can deal with that increase in demand when your single goes to number one. Podcasts can also present problems as a lot of users will automatically download new episodes as soon as they become available. A specialized podcast host like Libsyn or blubrry is ready for that kind of action, while a shared web server can strain under the pressure of hundreds or thousands of users downloading a large file at the same time.

Again, you certainly can host audio and video files on your GreenGeeks site. But if you expect (or hope) to serve large numbers of users all downloading at essentially the same time, a shared hosting platform may not be the ideal backbone for that. If you can offload media streaming to a specialized platform, your website will continue to perform great under the pressure of popularity and you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds.

Estimates Are Estimates

Finally, unless you already have an active website it’s difficult to estimate how much space you might need for the project you have planned. You’ll usually find that the need for storage space grows more rapidly than you’ve anticipated, so if you lock yourself into a limited storage space plan, make sure you have the option of increasing the amount of space available to you should the need arise.

The post How Much Space Does My Website Need? appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

You can configure Drupal to use your GreenGeeks temporary URL which is useful for testing purposes and when moving a Drupal installation to GreenGeeks from another host. We’re going to edit two files to make the Drupal installation available on the temporary URL.

If you are comfortable using an FTP program and a text editor you can make these changes that way, but for this article, we’re going to make all the changes using cPanel.

Log in to cPanel

Log in to GreenGeeks and go to cPanel by clicking the “cPanel Login” button in the “Quick Server Login” section.

Open the File Manager

In the “FILES” section, click the “File Manager” link or icon.

Locate the Drupal Settings File

Navigate to the Drupal settings.php file. In this case, Drupal is installed in a directory named drupal, and the settings.php file can be found in  /sites/default.

Select the “settings.php” file and click “Edit.”

A file encoding popup will open. If your website uses English and standard characters, click the “Edit” button (if your site uses another language that does not use UTF-8 encoding, select the appropriate encoding and click the “Edit” button).

Make Your Temporary URL the Base URL in the Config File

Find the portion of the file that references the “Public file base URL.” Change this:

To this:

Click the “Save Changes” to complete the edit.

What we’ve done is removed the hash from the beginning of the line and replaced the example URL in the file with our GreenGeeks temporary URL. (Your temporary URL is the server IP address that can be found in your signup email followed by /~ and your account username. It looks like this: http://192.186.0.0/~ggexample/)

Edit the .htaccess file

By default the cPanel File Editor hides “dot” files, so to edit .htaccess, you must first configure the cPanel File Editor to display dot files.

In the File Manager, click the “Settings” button.

In the “Preferences popup window, check “Show Hidden Files” and click the “Save” button.

Open up the .htaccess file for editing in the same way you opened settings.php. Enter this line (replacing “cpanelusername” with your GreenGeeks cPanel username):

RewriteBase /~cpanelusername

Click the “Save Changes” button.

That’s All There Is to It

Your Drupal installation should now be accessible using your temporary URL.

Make sure that you undo these changes when you have finished testing or point your domain to GreenGeeks (to reverse the changes, just put a hash in front of the base URL line in settings.php and delete the line you added to .htaccess).

GreenGeeks is a proud supporter of the Drupal community, and we support all the latest versions of Drupal, including Drupal 8.

The post Using Drupal on a Temporary URL appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

Log in to GreenGeeks. From the left-hand panel, go to “Support” and click, “Site Migration Request.”

Select the hosting service of which you would like to request migration.

To transfer your web site files and email from your current host, we need the account login information:

• Previous Hosting Provider
• Control Panel URL
• Control Panel Type
• FTP Hostname
• Control Panel/FTP Username
• Control Panel/FTP Password
• Additional Instructions: If you have any additional instructions for us such as a particular folder or database that you want to be moved, please provide it here.

When you have completed all the fields, click the “Submit” button.

If our website migration team requires any additional information, they will request it via email. We will send you an email verification when we have completed the migration.

IMPORTANT NOTES

• Do not change your name server or other DNS settings to our servers until your web site files and email have been moved to our servers by you or one of our representatives. Updating DNS prematurely will cause your web site to become unavailable and disrupt email service.
• If we encounter slow download or upload speeds at your current web hosting provider, delays may result.

The post Site Migration Instructions for Shared Hosting appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.

* cPanel Migrations include all domains, Addon Domains, Subdomains, cPanel settings, email, and email accounts. Please note that this requires your old host’s cPanel backup generator to be active.

** Manual Migrations include most things that are not cPanel to cPanel transfers (essentially anything that cannot be easily packaged and restored). A few examples:

• Transferring from a host without cPanel
• Moving from an EcoSite account to a Reseller account and moving Addon domains into new cPanel sub-accounts
• Addon domain to Addon domain
• cPanel account to Addon domain
• Addon domain to cPanel account

Additional Migrations:
Should you require more migrations than are included with your hosting account, additional charges are applicable.  Base pricing is outlined below. Discounts may be offered for bulk migrations.

*Only available for managed VPS plans.

Location Migrations:
GreenGeeks offers several different physical locations to host your website.  Customers can request to have their existing account migrated to a new server location for a one-time $29.95 fee by opening a Support Ticket.

Migrating Infected Sites:
GreenGeeks is unable to scan your site for malware before you migrate to us. However, if you believe your site is compromised, we can scan your site for malware after your migration is complete upon request.

GreenGeeks includes 1 complimentary malware cleanup with each hosting account. For details please see our Cleanup Terms of Service.

The post GreenGeeks Migration Policy appeared first on GreenGeeks Support.