Guided Transfer – will site go down temporarily?

  • Unknown's avatar
    kwalshmac · Member ·

    I am interested in paying for the guided transfer. I have already paid BlueHost for Hosting (my domain name was purchased through wordpress).

    I started the process myself – figured out how to point the domain to BlueHost, did the 5 minute install, and got the ftp site up with Dreamweaver remotely at home. My problem occurred when I went to import my export wordpress.com xml file. Only the temporary URL name showed up….

    Also – currently, SOME of my readers are reporting 404 errors – while others are not. I got plenty of hits today and blog comments.

    I’m so confused!

    I’m ready to just pay the money for them to set up the transfer for me – to make sure it’s done right – but I’m worried about my site being down or not being able to make my daily post.

    I’m curious to know if my site will be down for the 24 hours that it takes to do the transfer.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kraftbj · Staff ·

    Howdy,

    Your site won’t go “down”. We’ll transfer everything over to Bluehost and once it is ready, we’ll flip the switch.

    There will be a short time when we’re actually making the transition that we’ll ask you not to add new posts (since the new post would be on the old site while we’re already working on making sure the new site is ready). Typically, this window is only as long as needed to get everything switched over–not an entire day–likely a few hours.

    Please let me know if you have any questions! Cheers!

  • Unknown's avatar
    kwalshmac · Member ·

    Thanks – for that.

    But regarding all my other questions – do you have any advice?

    Or any reasoning about why some readers are seeing a 404 error?

    Or what step I must be missing with the transfer? I like to think I’m pretty computer literate and do my own coding and design. But, for some reason this transfer as puzzled me.

  • kraftbj · Staff ·

    When attempting to transfer the site, did you change the nameservers over to Bluehost for a bit, then switched it back?

    If so, my guess would be the Permalink setting on your Bluehost install ( Settings->Permalink) was set to something other than the standard WordPress.com one of /year/month/day/post-name/. With DNS/nameserver changes, the settings are cached so some folks will see the new Bluehost site while others are seeing WordPress.com and vice versa.

    If that’s the case, I would think that some folks were being taken to the Bluehost servers to a link that didn’t exist, while the same link did exist on WordPress.com.

    For the temporary URL, likely in your Bluehost’s install’s Settings->General was set to the temporary URL. Once the domain is pointed to Bluehost, you can change that setting to your domain.

    Our Guided Transfer team can take care of all of those steps though so you don’t have to fiddle with it or wonder if something is expected or going wrong.

    If you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    kwalshmac · Member ·

    That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for your help!

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