Actual title:Switching your search engine hosting from GDI to hostgator?Please read this first

Hello  everyone. Recently I have been busy trying to figure out how to switch my GDI domain  to Hostgator to host my People Search Engine. I would like to thank Kamesh,Linda and Trish for guiding me! I believe many of you in this situation would save yourself from a lot of frustration reading this.

If your planning to switch your domain hosting from GDI to Hostgator to host your search engine for whatever reason. You should be wary of  a few things:
1)To host your search engine with Hostgator. You must remember  it has to be your primary domain for Hostgator.  PrimaryDomain = The domain you registered your Hostgator with.

2)You cannot use an add-on Domain to host your search engine.

3)There is a $5 charge to switch primary domain in Hostgator

To switch your domain hosting from GDI to Hostgator to host your search engine
Problem arises when:

1)    You already have another domain registered as your prmary domain In hostgator
2)    You have a site running  on that primary domain with Hostgator.( Wordpress blog for example)

Let me guide you through the steps.

For this example we will use “GDI.WS” as your domain in GDI and  “otherdomain.com” as your domain regsitered with Hostgator.Before I begin the steps you should go to hostgator Livechat while doing this in case you have any problems. Their live chat support is good.
Here are the steps to take:
1)Go to your APS back office step 2 and click “delete” to remove the files from your GDI.

2)Go to your GDI back office>> Domain>Advanced nameserver>input the name server and IP address

3)Go to hostgator and fill in this form https://secure.hostgator.com/changedomain.php  a 5$ charge applies

4) You will receive an email from Hostgator to confirm your switching of domain. After confirming you will have to wait for a mail from Hostgator announcing that the switch has been completed. This can take up to 24 hours.(mine took roughly 4 hours)

5) Go to your APS back office step 2 choose Hostgator . Insert the required details and you now have your search engines hosted with Hostgator using your People Search Engine.

Now that you have gotten your search engine hosted, we need to get your “otherdomain.com” live again with all your webpages and contents.
When switching primary domain, your new primary domain  “GDI.WS” will read the files your previous primary domain “otherdomain.com” and will have the same contents (webpages media and such).

5) Go to your Cpanel. Addon domain> add your “otherdomain.com”

6)Now Get hostgator to transfer your files to your “otherdomain.com” trough Livechat.  Make it clear to them you want your site running like before with the same files. Explain to them the scenario. You will get it switched almost immediately. Once that is done your “otherdomain.com” is now live again.

(IMPORTANT: Do Not  FTP the files yourself,get hostgator to do them for you!)
Now your almost done, if your using wordpress, this is the final step. If you upload any media in to your posts by default it will be uploaded to your previous primary domain folder . You do not want that, you want the files to be uploaded in your  new location.

7) Go to Wordpress dashboard>settings>miscellaneous>Store uploads In Folder
>>/public_html/wp-content/uploads
You will want to switch it to
>> /public_html/otherdomain.com/wp-content/uploads
This should get your files uploaded to the right folder and get your Wordpress Blog/site up and running like before.

Your done!

Drop me a PM if you need any help on this

-Brandon Sean

Last edited by 0b1 (2010-02-09 09:52:53)