Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

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Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
WE MAY HAVE TO MOVE THE WEBSITE.  IF YOU HAVE SUGGESTIONS PLEASE ADVISE!

I've been working in the background with Weebly, the outfit that hosts the documentation portion of our website, because of some issues I've been seeing, including:

The site is apparently too big for them to copy.

Adding pages is becoming very onerous due to the # of pages we have - but we will need more.

Backups take ~4 hours to download and frequently the download fails and has to be restarted.

And today someone is playing around with things such that the embedded pages don't work, and we have hundreds of them

Today I asked this on the Weebly support forum: Adam - Is my site too large, either page-wise or data-wise, for Weebly?  To which Adam, a Weebly employee, said "That's very possible"

With more than 500 pages I REALLY don't want to have to recreate them.  So some form of migration tool appears to be needed.  And so far all I've found is a tool to migrate Weebly to Wordpress.  But I don't know much about Wordpress - do any of you?

Anyone know of other options?
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

85lebaront2
Administrator
Some sites I go to use WordPress, I can ask my IT guy (you know who Gary) and see what he says, or I can send you his email privately. We were using a hosting company he uses for his private site so it was different, and we used PHPNuke for it.
Bill AKA "LOBO" Profile

"Getting old is inevitable, growing up is optional" Darth Vader 1986 F350 460 converted to MAF/SEFI, E4OD 12X3 1/2 rear brakes, traction loc 3:55 gear, 160 amp 3G alternator Wife's 2011 Flex Limited Daily Driver 2009 Flex Limited with factory tow package Project car 1986 Chrysler LeBaron convertible 2.2L Turbo II, modified A413

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
I see that you did give me his email address.  Thanks, Bill.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
I'm in tech (but am not a Wordpress expert at all), and the first thing in my mind was WordPress as well.  There are lots of hosting companies that provide easy installs of Wordpress on their hosted systems.  I have used it before on Dreamhost and it's pretty easy to get going.
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Thanks.  It is good to hear for someone that has been around it.  All I know is what I read about it.

But having said that, Wordpress does seem to have a whole lot more users than Weebly, which means something.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
WordPress is extensible, which means you can go as far down the Rabbit Hole as you'd like to go, there's also lots of plugins you can add to extend functionality without having to write customizations yourself.  It's based on PHP if I recall correctly.

For mainly static content like this site is now, it should be pretty straightforward.
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Thanks.  I need to read up on how to use Wordpress, meaning how to create and edit pages.  But, I've coded machine language, assembler, Fortran, Basic, and snippets of HTML, so should be able to grasp it somehow.

And I need to find a host site, but there seem to be scads of those.  Any recommendations?
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
No problem..

You're right, there's lots of hosting companies out there...

As I mentioned above, I have a Dreamhost account where I can easily turn on WordPress, perhaps we could even try to import the site onto a test instance, and see how it goes as a private beta.

If it works out ok, then we can figure out how to make the site live for general access with your own account, depending on the content size/price.  We can discuss those details privately, but I may be able to just host it for you as-is.  If that doesn't work for some reason, new accounts are pretty cheap (less than $20 per month).  In that case, we could even set up a Patreon account or something for people to chip in on hosting prices.  Just some food for thought.
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
Just so happens WordPress has a list of suggestions:

https://wordpress.org/hosting/
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Sorry it has taken so long to get back, but we've had a houseful of Bullnose folks.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas and the offer.  I'm going to try to work with Weebly on the issues this week, but if that doesn't go well then I think I'd like to take you up on the offer to test Wordpress.  From what I've read the migration tool takes the backup I download and converts to Wordpress.  Then that is uploaded to a hosting service and you have to go in and see what it looks like.

If we could do that on yours that would make it much easier to find out if it is going to work.  Then if it does I can set up an account and do the migration to that.

I'm also thinking about getting a new domain name that is more descriptive of what we are doing than Gary's Garagemahal.  And this would seem to be the time to make that happen.  Let the Garagemahal site work as we get the new one up and tweaked, and then redirect the URLs to the new one.

Thoughts?
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
This post was updated on .
No worries!  I figured so, I know the truck show was this week.  I wish my truck was ready for a drive like that (coming from CA)! I hope it went well.

Your plan sounds good.  There are couple ways to manage it if you wanted to keep the current domain name.  We could just update the DNS record for the site to go a new IP for a "all at once" migration or like you said, just redirect this site to a new one.  Either way is just fine.  It probably makes more sense for this one to stay up and running until we are out of the woods.

Are you going to keep the Nabble forum?

bullnosebible.com and thebullnosebible.com are both available, FYI
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
I was a bit reluctant to actually say which URL's I was considering for fear someone would take them, but you nailed them.  Does anyone have a preference?

As for Nabble, I haven't found a migration tool to anything from Nabble.  But maybe you can?

W/o a way to migrate I can't see changing.  But going phpBB on Wordpress might be nice if we could keep our current content.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
Oops, sorry I let the cat out of the bag.  Hopefully it isn't an issue.

I haven't seen anything except for companies offering to migrate your data for a fee.  Probably not worth it, and we should focus on one issue at a time haha.
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Vic Roma
In reply to this post by Gary Lewis
Facebook started as "thefacebook.com" then dropped the definite article "the".
Choose the first domain name, it reads/sounds better.
1984 Bronco 351 Holley Sniper EFI, 3 Speed Ford Auto.
1986 Bronco 302 EFI, AOD, Eddie Bauer, with 3G alternator.
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Thanks.  Was thinking about that late last night.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Ok guys, another Wordpress question.  What ways can pdf's be put on a Wordpress page?

I ask because we have 10's if not 100's of pdf's on the site.  They are hosted on my OneDrive and embedded on pages on the Weebly site.  But, apparently because they aren't really on the site Google doesn't crawl them so they cannot be found in a Google search.

What we need is a way to get Google to crawl the pdf's so people can find them.

I've been reading about Wordpress and I've found two different ways of placing them on - the iframe approach I'm using now and things like PDF Embedder Premium.  Does anyone know about the ability for Google to crawl pdf's embedded that way?
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Not to take away from the previous question, which really does need to be answered, but I have "purchased" the URL bullnosebible.com. So some day we'll use that instead of garysgaragemahal.com.

I'm still thinking that we are going to have to move to Wordpress. Another Weebly staff member has concurred that our site has outgrown them, and we are no where near "done". So I've been doing a lot of reading, both about Wordpress itself as well as hosting sites.

Oddly enough, looking at the rate structures on one hosting site we are already about to top out the max # of visits/month that their base rate allows. That's 20k/month, and in the last 30 days according to Weebly we've had 18.3K, which is up 7% over the previous 30 day period. So the site is more of a presence than I thought.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
In reply to this post by Gary Lewis
Hi Gary,

It's difficult to prove, but I have a theory is that it has to do with the pages being externally hosted.  

If we pulled them in to be hosted on the same domain, they would be indexed.  As far as I can tell, there's no issues with Google indexing <iframe> content.  It should work.  That being said, it's probably down to the PDFs being externally hosted.

The three mainstream ways to embed PDFs in a page seem to be:

<iframe>

Google Docs also has a way to embed PDFs, even if the content isn't on Google Drive.  (Kinda like you are doing with Live)

If it were me doing it, I'd probably try <iframe>, then .  And, I'd pull the content all onto the site so you have less external dependencies and robots like Google etc associate the content with your site.

-Chris

Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

Gary Lewis
Administrator
Chris - I think we are in agreement.  But let me take it a step more: I believe it has to do with Google not knowing who has permission to access the file, and since they don't know they don't bother to index it since they don't want to show search results to someone that cannot access them.

It looks to me like there's a way around that, and that is to make the files accessible to anyone on the web.  But in doing that they'll be found outside of the website as well as maybe inside.  I don't want the traffic to go around the website, so I've set them up as accessible to anyone with the link.

So you may be correct that hosting the files on the same place that hosts the site may work.  But we need to figure that out 'cause a whole bunch of our content isn't being found.
Gary, AKA "Gary fellow": Profile

Dad's: '81 F150 Ranger XLT 4x4: Down for restomod: Full-roller "stroked 351M" w/Trick Flow heads & intake, EEC-V SEFI/E4OD/3.50 gears w/Kevlar clutches
Blue: 2015 F150 Platinum 4x4 SuperCrew wearing Blue Jeans & sporting a 3.5L EB & Max Tow
Big Blue: 1985 F250HD 4x4: 460/ZF5/3.55's, D60 w/Ox locker & 10.25 Sterling/Trutrac, Blue Top & Borgeson, & EEC-V MAF/SEFI

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Re: Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

ckuske
Administrator
If we can make/upload our own HTML file to the site, we should be able see by uploading a PDF file and embedding the PDF file in that HTML file.

You can then use the Google tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none) to ask it to crawl the website and we can see if it works.  It takes a few days though.

Also, I noticed the robots.txt (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/robots.txt) on the site has some pages blocked.  It seems Weebly adds some entries automatically.  The link you sent above noted this as well.
Chris

'84 F-150 XL 2WD Flareside, 302 w/ AOD transmission, Motorcraft 2150 feedback carb w/ CA Emissions, EEC-IV w/TFI, factory A/C, speed control - Info about me and my truck - My project thread
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