17 January 2018

The Edward Ringwald Websites has a new hosting home!


The Edward Ringwald websites has just recently moved into a new hosting home!  I have been with our current web hosting provider for a few years; however, my current web hosting provider was recently acquired and the costs to keep the websites on my current web hosting provider keep going up.  And up.  And still up every year.  An important point when you are watching your finances.

So, I had to go shopping for a new web hosting provider and I managed to find one.  After evaluating a few web hosting providers I settled on InMotion Web Hosting after reading the positive reviews it received on cNet.  I visited InMotion's web site and went through a demonstration of the web hosting products and services InMotion has to offer.  I was very impressed with the features you get for the level of web hosting you want.

That said, I signed up with InMotion.  Another great feature of InMotion is their website transfer service in which their support team will move your website from your current hosting provider to InMotion; I took advantage of this valuable service as soon as I signed up for hosting and they did an awesome job in moving the files that keep the Edward Ringwald Websites running!

Now all that remains for me is to go in and update the settings in the domain names that will transition from my current hosting provider to InMotion.  As with the joys of the Internet, this involves DNS (which stands for Domain Name System) changes which take about 24 to 48 hours to propagate around the world as each DNS server is updated with the new information.

So, did I confuse you a little about DNS?  Well, it's time for a Great American Teach-In Moment!

The DNS system delegates the responsibility of assigning domain names and mapping them to Internet resources, according to this article on Wikipedia.  In layman's terms, when you type in edwardringwald.com (as an example) in your browser's address bar and press enter, your request is passed on to the DNS server of your Internet provider.  The DNS server looks up the edwardringwald.com domain name and finds its unique IP (Internet Protocol) address assigned to it.  Once that IP address is found your browser sends the request to the IP address assigned to edwardringwald.com and the web server sends you the edwardringwald.com home page.  In short, DNS is like an electronic phone book of domains and their IP addresses.

When a change has to be made to the domain name's DNS information, the web site owner makes the changes with the provider who maintains the domain name.  Once the changes are submitted due to so many DNS servers around the world the changes take about 24 to 48 hours to take place.

All that remains is for me to change the DNS information for the web site domains - edwardringwald.com, interstate275florida.com, drawbridgeahead.com and our web site portal, edwardringwaldwebsites.com - to point to our new web hosting home.  In other words, when you type edwardringwald.com after the DNS is updated you will be taken to the same edwardringwald.com web site you know and see today, the only difference is that we are at a new web hosting home.  That will take place in the next couple of days and during the time of DNS propagation you might get some 404 error pages as we make the transition to our new web hosting home.