I am replatforming a html-only site i.e. rewriting a site from scratch using Zen-Cart. While I'm at it I am moving the site to new hosting company.

So my deployment requirements are:
I need to launch the site without interrupting the current site and switch over only when the new store has been QAed.

The bottom line question is: how do I launch the store, QA the store and then switch/flip from the old html-only site to the new (fully QAed) Zen-Cart.

Here's my plan:
My real domain is visitme.com. that's where the live production site lives and I have another domain mytestdomain.com that I use for testing.

  1. visitme.com is live on my old host. It's getting visitors every day.
  2. Install ZC under test.mytestdomain.com on the new host. It has only one visitor - me. I'm testing/adding products, etc.
  3. QA the store test.mytestdomain.com
  4. Enable payment
  5. Test a live transaction
  6. At this point test.mytestdomain.com is what I want visitme.com to look like. I'm ready to go live to the world.
  7. modify configuration of ZC to use visitme.com instead of test.mytestdomain.com as the base (how? with zc_install or will I lose my database/products?)
  8. point DNS to new host for visitme.com
Seems reasonable to me, but maybe there's a better way...