If you’re an Apple MobileMe user, you may have heard that several features are being discontinued as Apple completes the transition to iCloud. Come June 30, 2012, Gallery photos, iDisk files, and iWeb hosted websites will be taken down.
But don’t worry! This doesn’t mean you have to lose your iWeb websites or even stop using iWeb. All you have to do is relocate your website files onto a new web hosting server and everything will continue working perfectly. This is where Bluehost can help.
Moving your iWeb site to Bluehost web hosting is easy and we’ve put together a set of instructions on how to do so. Just follow along and your site will be up and running on Bluehost severs in no time!
There are a couple ways to do this, but we find the Publish to a Folder option to the be easiest. There is an FTP publishing option inside the iWeb program, but it results in your website url reading: http://www.example.com/site_name/page-name.html, instead of a much cleaner http://www.example.com. To avoid this mess, we recommend using the Publish to a Folder option.
Publish to a Folder
To get started, you’ll need 1) a Bluehost web hosting account and 2) a FTP Client application. You can get a Bluehost account in minutes at bluehost.com, and if you need to download a FTP Client, there are many free options such as Filezilla, SmartFTP, and CyberDuck. For an easy-to-use interface, our developers recommend using CyberDuck, so we’ll use it for our example here.
Once you have both of these, open your iWeb program and follow these steps:
1. Click Site Name (on the left hand panel of iWeb – iWeb Site in the example)
2. Under “Publish to:” choose Local Folder.
3. Select the folder to which you want to save your website files. Remember this location, because you’ll be moving these files to your Bluehost server in the next few steps.
4. Now that iWeb is configured to save your website to the local folder you designated, select File–> ‘Publish Entire Site‘. This will save the most recent version of your iWeb site to the local folder on your computer.
Next, open your FTP client. As I mentioned earlier we’ll be using CyberDuck, so the instructions will be based on the Cyberduck FTP client, but feel free to use whichever program you prefer.
5. Click ‘Open Connection‘
6. Enter the domain name for your website. This is the URL people use to reach it. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one with the Domain Manager in your Bluehost hosting account.
7. Enter your cPanel Username and password (this is your Bluehost control panel login)
8. Expand ‘More Options‘
9. Enter the Path ‘public_html‘. You can also use ‘public_html/addon’ for a given add-on domain if you have one.
10. Click ‘Connect‘
11. Now that the public_html folder is open, drag the files within your website’s folder into CyberDuck. This is the folder you saved your iWeb site to from Step 3.
And that’s it! As soon as the transfer is complete your website should be up and running on Bluehost severs in no time!
We hope this helped make your MobileMe transition easier. If you have any additional questions or troubleshooting issues, please give our Bluehost team a call anytime at 888-401-4678. They’re available 24/7 via phone, email, and chat to answer your questions.
Tiffany
Bluehost
