A PhoneBoy Primer On: Minimize the Impact of Changing ISPs
Meanwhile, for those of us on the net, my next subject will be something
I'm sure you can all sympathize with. Changing Internet Service Providers
has to be one of the biggest pains of the new digital frontier. Of course,
depending on how "plugged in" you are to the net, it can be anything from
a mild inconvienance to a big nightmare. For example, consider moving to
another city. Most likely, your phone number will be different, but you
can usually get the phone company to announce your new number on your old
number. The US Postal Service can forward your mail from your old address
for up to a year. People can still get into contact with you if you forget
to tell someone you've moved.
Now translate this into cyberspace. Your email address will become invalid
the moment you tell your ISP that you want to move on to greener pastures
and your web pages will come back with error 404's (not found on server).
Unless you pay to continue service at your ISP, they will not forward email
and web accesses for you. Few ISPs, if any, offer a "forwarding" service
for either reduced cost or free. If your web pages have made it into a
search engine, it will take months for the search engines to drop the "old"
URLs for your pages and put the new ones in.
Basically, every time you have to change ISPs for one reason or another,
unless you broadcast to all your friends or register with some service
like Four11, they will lose contact
with you. But there are some pre-emptive steps you can take to insure that
people can get in contact with you no matter where you move.
Email
The first thing you can do to insure people can get a hold of you is to
maintain an Email address independently of your ISP. By far, my most favorite
is HotMail, which gives you a free
email account that you can access with any web browser. Feature-wise, it's
about as good as any POP mail reader, and is quite usable in any recent
web browser. You can even send attachments via HotMail, though that feature
requires Netscape 2.0 or later browser. You can even download your POP
mailbox from your ISP and read it on HotMail! Very nice. The only downside
to HotMail is that you have to give some demographic information to HotMail
as you get hit with a banner ad for each "page" you hit.
Another service like HotMail is NetAddress,
which provides a similar, but slicker interface. It also has some additional
features like allowing you to forward email to other places and filter
it into folders or delete outright. And, if you'd like, you can also retrieve
your email from a POP mail reader, too, though they add advertising to
each message. The one feature missing that's available on HotMail -- sending
attachments. This should not be too hard to implement, though it is quite
dependent on a Netscape browser.
Other services that allow you to have email addresses independent of
your ISP include Juno, which requires
special client software to use and pobox.com,
which charges $15/year for both email and URL reflection to your ISP.
Web Pages
Web Pages are a pain to redirect. You have to make up "this page has moved"-type
pages with just links and/or pages with the appropriate <META> tags.
If you have a good provider, you can do re-directs in your configuration
files. But still, it's a big pain, especially when you have to wait for
the search engines to see your new URLs and quit turning up your old ones.
If you have popular-enough web pages, you may wish to look into a seperate
ISP for your web pages. For a year or so, I could not find a good provider
for both PPP and Web Hosting services, so I had two of them. But there
still may be a time when you have to change ISPs or otherwise move your
pages somewhere else.
The biggest hint I can give on web pages is to make sure that you use
"relative links" where possible in all of your pages. When you move to
the new server, it will be a much smoother transition. If you use ISP-specific
CGI programs, make sure that your new ISP either has equivelants or you
can "roll your own" as necessary. If you have reasonably popular pages,
make sure you re-register them with the search engines so that people can
find them when they move.
Custom Domains
The one thing you can do to make your move the easiest is to get with an
ISP that will allow you to use your own custom domain name. With a custom
domain, moving service providers isn't quite as bad. When you move ISPs,
your IP addresses gets updated to those for the new provider. You need
to keep your old and new service going for a few days while the Internet
sorts out your old and new IP addresses, but email and web hits will still
get to you.
Registering a fancy domain name under .com, .org, or .net top-level
domains require a bit of ingenuity. All the good domains have already been
taken. And, of course, it costs $100 to register your domain name with
the InterNIC. To save a little money
and strain on the brain, you can get a domain under a city.state.us domain
for either much less than what InterNIC charges or for free (varies on
locality). Check out the web page for The
US Domain Registration Services for more details.
Last Update: 27 July 1997
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