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I have recently had a website created for me by an IT company. The problem is that i am being charged extortant amounts of money to change minor things. They have charged me to a create a small CMS system, but it is overly simple and gives me very little control.

I want to move my website to a new host so that I have full control of it.

Can someone please explain the process i would have to go through in order to achieve this?

NB: I have experience working with SQL, phpMyAdmin, HTML, CSS etc.

Any and all help is much appreciated.. :)

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what kind of site is this? Have you considered moving to something like Wordpress? – JohnP May 12 '11 at 12:05
I am considering wordpress.. but i have no idea what CMS they are currently using.. i am being told it is an "in house" built CMS so i am wondering how i would do this.. – Ibz May 12 '11 at 12:08
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@lbz well, if it's a custom CMS you'll need to put the data into wordpress manually. Unless you know how to write a converter for WP – JohnP May 12 '11 at 12:13
thats something im willing to do as they are charging me close to £100 for small thing i want to change lol.. ridicolous.. would it just be a case of changing the html files to point to new addresses and then uploading them? – Ibz May 12 '11 at 12:17
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If you own the domain name, you should be able to point it to a new host. Depends on whether you have access to your domain name. – JohnP May 12 '11 at 12:20
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migrated from stackoverflow.com May 12 '11 at 19:21

1 Answer

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If you have full control over your DNS records, then you can create a subdomain (test.mydomain.com) and point the A record to a new hosting company. Here you can build your new website (a CMS is always a good option, will make for faster development). When the new site is done and ready, change the A record of mydomain.com and/or www.mydomain.com to the IP address of the new hosting company and then switch the rest over.

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the thing is, they are restricting my access to the website as it is, although i think i would be able to get a copy of all the html files and stuff.. would it just be a case of pointing links in the new direction before uploading them at the new host? – Ibz May 12 '11 at 12:14
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There are tools that allow you to grab everything from a website, but all you will grab is the content in the form of HTML. This will probably work for you. You can navigate to each page and grab the contents. I will see if I can find the name of such a utility. – Leons May 12 '11 at 12:31
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The primary concern is the domain name., If you do not have full control over the DNS records, the it will be a little harder to manage. – Leons May 12 '11 at 12:31
hopefully they will allow me access to the domain that i pay for.. thank you for your help Leons :) if you could name one of these utilities it will be very useful :) – Ibz May 12 '11 at 12:44
GetLeft is a utility that will pull down a website's content. – phaedra May 14 '11 at 14:00

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