Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages. This guide is designed to help make the migration of web sites from Freeola's Web Freedom hosting packages to our new VIP hosting packages.

Due to upgrades to the Freeola web hosting service, we are pleased to announce that customers who are subscribed to our Web Freedom service can upgrade to our new VIP Hosting service at no extra cost.

The VIP Hosting service is, in essence, the same great service you were getting from Web Freedom. However, your website will be hosted on our brand-new, high specification servers which offer greater security, performance and flexibility and a host of optional extra features for advanced users.

To upgrade, simply log into MyFeeola and you will be guided through the upgrade process. If you don't already have a Web Freedom website to upgrade then you can always sign up for a new VIP Hosting service as well.

During the process of migrating your website to the new VIP servers you will be given the opportunity, before you commit to completing the migration, to check that your website is working on it's new VIP webspace. At no stage during the migration process will your website be down and only once you are happy, with how your website works at its new home, will your live site be switched to point to the new VIP server.

Once you have uploaded all your website files to your new VIP account you will be given a temporary website address that you can put into the address bar of your web browser to check how your site will behave on the new VIP servers. This temporary address will be in the form vip1234567.freeolahosting.co.uk and will point to your webspace on the VIP servers.

This temporary address allows you to check your website behaviour on the VIP server without affecting your live site, as your main web address will continue to point to your current web space on the Web Freedom servers.

To ensure that you are fully testing your website, using your temporary address, please ensure that all your links are relative, or see Time-Saving Tip below. This is required because absolute links will still point to your live site on the Web Freedom server and not the site on the VIP server, which is reference by your temporary address. Therefore if you don't change them to relative links, or use the Time-Saving Tip below, the page that you see in your web browser will be the one servered up by the Web Freedom server and not the VIP server. You do not have to change your links to relative to make your site work on VIP hosting, just to test it at the temporary address, before you commit to the upgrade.

There are two ways you can link web pages using the HREF attribute. You can reference it absolutely or relatively.

• Absolute links consist of the protocol, which is used to get to the page, the server, the directory and finally the name of the page itself. For instance an absolute link will look like this: http://www.example/directory/index.html

• Relative links do not need the protocol and the server parts to function. For instance a relative link will look like this: directory/index.html

By using relative links you can ensure that your web pages will still be linked correctly, even if your website address changes.

If you find something on your website that is broken then there are some things you should check.

1. Please ensure, when testing your site, that you still have the temporary freeolahosting.co.uk address in your browser address bar (if you are not using the Time-Saving Tip below ).

2. If you get a "Permission denied" error then you should check that the correct file permissions are set. Files with one set of permissions may have worked fine on the Web Freedom servers but, because of improved security, will not work on the new VIP servers. There is more information on the differences between file permissions on the Web Freedom and VIP servers here.

3. If you get a "No such file or directory" error then you should check the file location. Because the file structure is different on the new VIP servers to that of the Web Freedom servers so you may need to update some file locations. There is more information on the differences between the file structure on the Web Freedom and VIP servers here.

4. The new VIP servers are using PHP5 only, where as the Web Freedom servers had support for both PHP4 and PHP5. Are you using a programming construct that relies on version 4 and now produces an error or a different behaviour? The best place to check for what has changed between PHP versions is the php.net website.

The more scripted files you have (.php, .php5, .pl, .cgi) the more likely it is that you will need to make modifications for your site to work on the new VIP servers

A useful and time-saving tip to test your site - you wont need to change absolute links to relative links - for web site programmers and developers is to edit your Windows hosts file to redirect your genuine address to point to the new VIP server. This file is often found here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Find the line for your VIP server, you will be given this as part of the upgrade proccess in MyFreeola, below and copy the example section into your hosts file and replace 'yoursite.com' with the address of your site, not the temporary freeolahosting.co.uk address but the genuine address of your website.

For example if you had a site address of mywebsite.co.uk and your VIP FTP server was vip12.freeola.net, you would add this new line to your hosts file: 93.174.140.12 mywebsite.co.uk

Once you have updated your hosts file you would need to restart your browser and then put mywebsite.co.uk into the address bar to test your site on the new server.

IMPORTANT: Once you have migrated your site you should ensure that you remove the line from your hosts file, otherwise you will not be able to view your website correctly once the upgrade process is complete