domain transfer problem

[philt]

I am in the midst of transferring a website to a new hosting service. On the old server the webfiles are all contained in a directory called httpdocs. On the new server, as anyone would expect, the files are to be uploaded into folders called www or into pub_html. Whoever heard of httpdocs. Anyhow since every single link to an image is preceded by a forward slash e.g. /images, none of the images display on the new server. Support people at the new ISP seemed to think that if I had software of some sort, like Dreamweaver or something, a direct upload of the entire site from the software application would take care of things. Not sure if this is true or not. It begins to look like I'm going to have to go through the entire site carefully doing search and replace on every page. That is unless someone here has another idea and if so I'd be happy to hear it.

[steve.ledger]

Should not require anything like that Phil.

On your original server, if the root folder was /httpdocs - and on the new server it's /public_html, then your entire site just needs to go to that root folder.
The relative links will remain intact and do not need changing.
If the domain name has been transfered to the new host, even absolute links will remain resolvable, so no change needed their either.


Phil, is this a Web Designer or Xtreme site?
Have you posted in the correct forum?

[ckh]

Could be a propagation issue if you just changed the nameservers on the domain. Things can look and act weird for someone that has visited the old site recently then moves the site, changes the nameservers, and tries to see the results on the new site.

Both your computer and your ISP caches dns requests to make the lookups quicker along with the browser caching. You can try with a Windows machine (no idea on a Mac) to click start->run and type in:

ipconfig /flushdns

A dos box will flash open quickly then close, it'll may look like nothing happened.

Next step, clear your browser cache and after that try viewing the site again.

It shouldn't matter what the document root is, if it's httpdocs then the '/' would start you out in the httpdocs directory and if it's public_html, it'll start you out in the public_html directory.

[philt]

Thanks again, Sledger and to Chris. It's still something of a mystery to me. What I'm doing is transferring the entire domain to the new hosting service (HostPapa). The new account having been set up my instructions were to upload everything, which I have done. But the actual transfer (to the new DNS) has not taken place yet, the current site administrator first has to reply with permissions to a message coming from CIRA (Canadian Internet Reg). So I'll just wait and see--5 to 7 days they say. I expected things to work just as both of you say. Meantime, having removed all the forward slashes, it seems to be working. Oddly, the support people at HostPapa thought there was no other solution than to do the search and replace.