Hi, I am interested in hosting our company's web site with Winhost, but would like to keep our email hosting with our current vendor. Here are my questions: 1) How do we move our web site from Winhost? Do I need to have a new dedicated IP address with Winhost? 2) I am using VS2008, can I 'publish' my web site to Winhost directly from VS2008? 3) I am also interested in using SQL2005, and plan to update our database once a day. Do you have any tools that conveniently allow us to do that? 4) Can I upgrade from Basic Winhost plan to Winhost Max anytime without any additional fee? Thanks much, Tom L.
You have several options on how to you can keep you're existing email server. The fastest and easiest is to update the name servers to point to our DNS server but go to the Domain Manager in the control panel and update the MX record to point to your existing mail server. You may want to look at this demo control panel to get a feel for the Winhost control panel. https://demo.Winhost.com/default.aspx Try looking at this kb article for instructions on how to publish your site using VS 2008. http://support.Winhost.com/KB/a483/how-to-deploy-visual-studio-20082005-visual-web-developer.aspx Once you are ready to move your SQL 2005 database to our SQL 2008 Server refer to this kb article. This kb article has information on the "Restore/Attach" feature in the control panel. http://support.Winhost.com/KB/a771/how-do-i-generate-or-restore-a-backup-of-my-database.aspx There is no additional cost to upsizing a plan. The only cost is the price difference from Basic to the Max plan.
Instead of changing the MX record through your control panel, can I change the MX record from my email hosting vendor and point my web site to Winhost. If so what do I need from Winhost?
Yes you can do that. If you want to host your own DNS server simply create the same A record as we do on our DNS server. Log into your Winhost control panel and navigate to the Domain Manager. In there you should see how your A record is setup on our DNS server. Simply create the same entry on your DNS server and your domain name should be able to point to our web server.
Ok. I have another question: What do you mean by "Monthly Bandwidth/Data Transfer"? If I have customers or visitors navigate my web page that have text and pictures at around 100k, does the it count as "Bandwidth/Data Transfer"? How do I calculate or estimate my Bandwidth/Data Transfer? I am trying to decide which one of your hosting plans that meet my requirements.
The monthly Bandwidth/Data transfer is any HTTP calls to your website. This can be simply calling on your website or if your websites performs audio streaming that can also include in the Bandwidth/Data transfer. Sending emails, or querying your database or uploading files via FTP is not part of this "Bandwidth/Data" transfer. I cannot tell you how much your site will use only you will know that, but we do have a monitoring tool in the control panel that monitors your bandwidth usage. And don't forget the monitor is a month to month basis. Which means at the beginning of the month it resets itself back to 0.
Unfortunately there is no plan where we simply increase your bandwidth allotment for a fee. If you need more bandwidth you will need to upsize to the higher plan.
Unless you have a really popular site or really big file downloads, it's unlikely that bandwidth will be an issue. Our most inexpensive plan offers 50 gigabytes of bandwidth and most web sites can measure monthly bandwidth use in megabytes.
