If you host your personal website on MobileMe it’s time to plan your exit strategy, moving your site to a different web hosting service that is.
Luckily migrating your website from MobileMe is not that difficult. Follow me.
Yesterday MacRumors reported that iWeb and MobileMe website hosting are going to be discontinued once Apple introduces iCloud. This rumor comes from an allegedly email that Steve Jobs sent to a concerned iWeb user:
Question: Dear Mr. Jobs,
Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?
I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought of re-training sucks more than MobileMe ever did.
Reply: Yep.
Sent from my iPhone
Somehow I sensed that something like that would happen. I personally never used MobileMe web hosting but it was a nice addition to the services offered. iWeb is a simple and honest web authoring tool. It does what it promises, nothing more nothing less.
By pure chance just yesterday I posted an article on how to move your data away from MobileMe and did not include any instructions on how to move your website away from MobileMe hosting (I’m going to edit that post and put a link to this article).
Anyway, here are the simple steps to grab your website and store it safely on your Mac. Once you do that you can easily move it to your favourite Web Hosting service.
You’ve got two ways to start:
a. Use Finder
b. Use an FTP client like Transmit or Cyberduck
If your website is large and contains plenty of pictures you might want to use an FTP client thanks to the higher speed.
Either way you need to connect to your iDisk. If you use Finder, you should have an icon that allows you to connect to iDisk:
- Browse to iDisk –> Web –> Sites –> [your website]
- Copy the whole [your website] (Test_Macography in the screenshot above) to the Desktop
- Done
This folder contains your index.html, Welcome.html and the rest of the files that makes your website on MobileMe.
This morning I easily moved a test website that I uploaded to MobileMe to a subdomain of macography.net. I used Transmit to upload the content of Test_Macograhy folder to the public_html directory of my website. It worked straight away.
You described the easy part. Migrating the content from one place to another.
The user who wrote to Steve Jobs was concerned about re-training, and I’m also concerned about losing the 20GB of storage space and of course the web services supplied by MobileMe.
I’m not sure that I can find all that for the same fee I’m currently paying Apple. Web hosting and storage doesn’t come for free and iCloud is not the answer. I also noticed, when I moved my site to another host that I lost features compared to MobileMe. My albums and photo pages was not displayed in a proper way.
You have to come up with something better than just file copy to say it’s easy to migrate from MobileMe.
If you want an alternative look at yahoo small business cost is $9.95 a month with the first three months at $7.95 . you get:
Site design tools Create your site with easy-to-use tools — no experience necessary.
(if you want to stop using iweb)
Photos, video, and audio Use our built-in media players to engage your visitors with photos, videos, and audio tracks.
Domain name Get your own personalized domain name (like papayadayspa.com).
Business email Get up to 1,000 email addresses (like ) and unlimited email storage (details).
24-7 support Reach our support team anytime, day or night, via phone, email, or our online help center.
Unlimited disk space
Unlimited data transfer
here’s the link:
Or you can wait like Lars for a turn key solution that will never come.
To me an imperfect something is better than a perfect nothing.
Copying from iDisk is not really the easiest or fastest way to do this. I make many sites in iWeb that are not hosted through MobileMe.
The best way to transfer your site so it works as it should is to do this.
1: go to your site in iWeb
2: change the name of your welcome page to “index”
3: in the section where you choose MobileMe or local folder to save your site…choose local folder and create one on your hard drive if necessary. Eg: “my website”
4: You will need to have a hosting plan with someone before the next steps
5: use an FTP program like Transmit to upload your entire site.
6. You will need to publish your “entire site” to the local folder from iWeb before you can upload it.
7: your site will be saved to your local folder “my website” .
8: within this folder you will see a few files. One will be called index. Ignore this file and all the others except the folder which should have your site name.
9; open the folder that has your site name.
10: inside you will see your entire site.
11: you want to upload all these files and folders to your web hosting space using FTP transmit.
12: since you have renamed your welcome page as “index” your site should behave as normal and be found by typing your URL.
Updating your site from here is not as simple as it was in iWeb . That is another story.
Hope this helps!!
Thanks for these instructions. I just moved my iWeb site over to Machighway the other day and used your instructions to get my site uploaded. They helped me setup iWeb so I could upload changes in the future, but this was helpful to get started. Thanks!
Well, thanks for effort, but this might be helpful just for handful of people. Majority of MobileMe users have published photo albums from iPhoto, or aperture. Now, since people got used to the look of My Gallery home page from which visitors can navigate to other albums, is there any way to save complete My Gallery page with links to individual galleries?
You can publish directly to a web hosting provider from within iWeb. No need to use an FTP client. Here is a video tutorial that shows how to convert your MobileMe iWeb site to a real web host;
http://iwebunlimited.com/iweb-tips/life-after-mobileme-transferring-to-a-hosting-company/
i have several dozen websites which with some practice operate(d) quite well on MobileMe. Transferring the entire bunch to a new service is just a bit more complicated than your overview.
Selecting a web service is non trivial. Most have support for other versions of html, that is they are unaware of the MobileMe and iWeb special features and coding.The first hurdle is name of the welcome page. index.html is indeed one possibility among many. If you have more than one site and an integrated main menu repeating this change for all your sites could bring chaos.
The entire suite of sites must be considered and restructuring appears daunting to me. I have specially coded cross links throughout my suite of sites. I hope somebody out there has considered this and implemented a hosting service with support for our specific issues.
I have several other hosts (iX, iWeb, inMotion, yahoo, mycomspan, etc.) None of these hosts understands nor supports Apple html fully or specifically.
the bottom line for me is that Apple has not been clear enough about the specific issues. the switch to iCloud not only causes chaos for more than ten years of web sites in my case, but the switch of support in email is worse. I have lost all of my contacts and must rebuild that system from some synch I did with other sites. I had built an integrated contact system for several associates and that is all gone when we switched to iCloud. No hint about a replacement.
Of course, I can tell myself, the Apple MobileMe products were not designed for the sophisticated user, I should not have adapted them for my complex needs. Problem over time was that several of my previous hosts had shifted there servers, in important cases death and other human failings (like a bad economy) have caused several hosting services to end abruptly. Since Apple has the deepest pockets I kept transfering sites to MobileMe I haled onto that service until recently.
for me the switch to iCloud has been a great garbage can in the ether. I will find time to replace a few sites and services, but most will simply stay gone.
I did backup and save all sites both as local original documents and ftp transfers before MobileMe shuts off. That is essential, akin, however, to having the local scouts take everything out of my home during a weekend rainstorm and leaving me the task of choosing what to save.
Unsavable is the WEB, the links which must be rebuilt that hyper thing that the web is all about.
Anybody who has sites on the archival lists experiences that of which I lament. Our old sites look ok at first glance but major functionality is gone. the candy wrapper is there, the contents are gone.
Oh, yeah, proud Mac user since 1978.
I like this one.
OK, technically first Mac was 83, the others were Apples and Lisas and such.
For anyone still looking for a MobileMe alternative, check out DomainIt, who is offerring a Mobile transfer discount: http://www.domainit.com/mobileme-hosting/
You can still use iweb if you wish and the cost is just $79 for a full year.
Hey Guys,
I have been working on migrating away from mobile me AND iWeb since it seems both are going to be unsupported by Apple.
I need a little help though since I doubt I’m as savvy as most of you when it comes to this type of stuff.
I was forwarding my website “labradorentertainment.net” to my mobile me site that I’d created for it.
I have my domain through Godaddy, and I’ve inserted the Nameservers from my hosting company to point my website over to my new hosting servers. For now, I’ve got my site saved to my Dropbox account and am pointing a temp address “labradorentertainment.tk” to my Dropbox website files.
My biggest problem right now is that no matter what I seem to do, I can’t get my real domain “.net” to come up when I type it into the address bar. I keep getting the Apple screen about iCloud and how I need to transition. I’ve logged into my mobile me account, downloaded all my website information to my desktop and then deleted it from mobile me, thinking that was the reason I’m still getting the Apple page when I try and go to my site, but that didn’t work either.
What do I need to do to cut Apple out of the mix and get my website functioning again? I’m working on recreating it with a different program since I’m not sure how much longer iWeb will be supported my Apple but in the meantime, I’d still like to have my domain active and working?
Any help would be very much appreciated!
This sucks, iWeb was easy, if I wanted to add a new picture to my website it was sooo easy to do, and the website was easy to build.. Thanks Apple this sucks !!