I’ve had the occasion to move the domain for Sheffield Environment Weeks from a local IT company’s control to Ionos and I wanted to record what happened for future reference.

Takeaways at the bottom:

The state of the site⌗

The site had the following major issues:

  • No mobile support
  • Required outdated PHP 5 - no upgrade path
  • Broken in many and various ways. (Analytics, sending emails, spam)
  • SSL configured but wrongly, causing browsers to tell mobile users the site was unsafe, and this was starting to show on desktop browsers too.

A rebuild and a re-hosting was required.

The case to move.⌗

We had to move from the existing host because they had set us up with an insecure password and when I asked for it to be changed their response was that since we didn’t have a service agreement (We had paid for hosting) or a Pay as You go agreement they were unable to help, and anyway, they don’t do hosting anymore so we should look for alternative providers.

They’d just taken a year’s hosting so that was rubbish. I’m still debating whether to name and shame them.

After getting that email we looked around and there were a few contenders for shared hosting. It’s not something I’ve done for a long long time as I can run my own servers and have done for years, but in this case the group decided they wanted something separated from my company and I felt that should be fine because I get to see what else is available.

So I found Ionos and needed to move the domain from the Local IT company to someone and I looked into the process. The first thing I needed to do was get the Local IT company to unlock the domain. This took weeks. In the end I had to show up at the premises of the Local IT company in person to get them to pay attention to me.

They showed me the control panel and I got the domain unlocked. I learned they were reselling Heart Internet £3.39+VAT at 300% markup.

Choosing alternative hosting.⌗

We could stay with Heart internet but on our own account. We also looked at Ionos. In the end I chose Ionos because they offer free SSL whereas Heart internet only offer free internet for the first year and then seem to charge £49.99+VAT per year, which is a complete waste of money. SSL is now free. Ionos was slightly more expensive, but they made more claims on performance.

Signing up with Ionos⌗

The process was not smooth. We needed to pay with Direct Debit and create an account for a membership organisation. The Ionos sign up process wants to understand what kind of account it is, individual, company, charity, other. We were “other”. Filling out the forms was easy and as part of that we wanted to transfer in sheffieldenvironment.org, but after a couple of days we hadn’t had our account accepted.

Then I received a call from Ionos. The guy was super friendly, and seemingly sorted us out with a “new account”. I think he said our first effort had not been accepted. But we were acceptable and so he would sort it out. And so we got some webhosting set up on a second account, but not, as we were to find out, the domain transfer. This phone call took 30 mins.

Transfer failure at Ionos.⌗

I then had to get a code from Local IT company. That took another week of prodding to get a response. I prepared the files on the webhosting space, updated the live site and started the transfer process providing Ionos with the authentication code. Though it was not clear this then needed to be confirmed by Local IT company, which again took some days to get them to do, multiple emails and phone calls to get a response. No in-person visit this time though. So I guess I should take that as a plus.

Then the domain kind of half came through to Ionos. Some parts of the control panel updated, but the site was showing the Ionos holding page. I had to get support, I learned

  • Getting hold of someone who is quite knowledgeable and helpful on the phone is easy.
  • Getting hold of them on email is hard.
  • If you ask their Ai “get me someone” they will think you are cancelling and give you a number for the cancellations department, which isn’t a useful hack to get what you want.

In the end it was the failed first account that had the transfer of the domain on it and so the old cancelled account was the one with the domain attached. After 2 days Ionos were able to sort it out via an email sent internally that escalated the problem.

Unexpected pleasures.⌗

The server we’re on is powerful. 256G of ram, 128 cores, and load around 15, which means there is bags of room and the site is super quick.

The web admin is OK.

SSH access! On shared web hosting!

Ionos answer calls at night.

Takeaways⌗

Don’t transfer the domain when getting a new account until the account is accepted and you’ve got some working web-space.

Call Ionos if you have a problem. But expect things to take days.

To get laravel working I needed to create a .bash_profile file like this:

alias php="/usr/bin/php8.3-cli"
alias pa="/usr/bin/php8.3-cli artisan"
alias composer='/usr/bin/php8.3-cli ~/composer.phar'

I also had to update the .htaccess in public to have the line

RewriteBase \

To make the redirects so that only 1 site (https://www.sheffieldenvironment.org) was active required some redirects:

#Redirect non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sheffieldenvironment\.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.sheffieldenvironment.org/$1 [R=301,L]

# Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.sheffieldenvironment.org/$1 [R=301,L]

This means that if people come in to the non-https version or without the “www.” they all get to the same place, which means Google will only index one site and not, potentially, 4 sites.