Moving website to Zen AND a new host

[bbemis]

Hi All,

I need some help! I am moving my website from a terrible hosting provider to a new host. The original host decided that they needed to move their customers to a new server and in the process broke my original site. Besides breaking my site, their service is horrible and my site is either slow or down more than it is functioning properly.

To fix these problems, I decided to move to a new host and build a new site using zencart. My original site was built with oscommerce. My original site is at www.blowininthewind.com and my new site is at www.holidaygardenflag.com. I don't know how to build a site without having it live, so both are currently live.

My intention is to move the url www.blowininthewind.com over to the new host once I'm done building the new site (it's not done yet).

I have been able to transfer my products and am confident that I will also be able to transfer my customers when I'm ready. What I need to know is when I move the www.blowininthewind.com url to the new zencart site (currently at www.holidaygardenflag.com), what do I need to do/ know to make this change. I know enough about this stuff to be dangerous and I'm by no means a professional. I'm concerned about my current (not so good, but at least they're there) web positions and how I'll be found.

I have almost 2000 customers and I don't want them to not be able to find me again if I make this change.

Any help is GREATLY appreciated.....I'm not a web guru, so please help me in layman terms if you can...

Billie

[afo]

What you need to do is make the www.blowininthewind.com domain a "parked" domain which points to www.holidaygardenflag.com. You should be able to do that through your CPanel (or whatever webmaster panel your host provides). Your hosting service can probably advise you better.

If you want to keep the www.blowininthewind.com separate and have it point to the same Zen Cart database, you can do that as well, but that'll require setting it up as a subdomain and installing Zen Cart for it.

[Stuff4Toys]

Mary is quite correct. Another option would be to use the BETA Multi-Site module so you can set up two entirely different looking templates with the same data and control panel.

[afo]

It depends on what the goal is. If you want customers used to visiting olddomain.com to see olddomain.com as the website instead of newdomain.com, then set up olddomain.com as a separate Zen Cart but point it to the same database (assuming both sites are selling the same items). Multisite sounds like an equally good possibility.

[bbemis]

My original thought was to just move the blowininthewind.com url over to the new host and then move the new zencart site to the blowininthewind.com url again.

[bbemis]

It wasn't my intention to leave the oscommerce site up....once I'm done with the zencart one, the zencart one will be the only one I have for this product line. My thought was to just delete the oscommerce one.