Moving from Windows 2003 Office server to Hosted online

First post, and after looking at the Forums so far I am impressed with the professional advice on offer.

My question is as follows-

I just bought a Domain name and Website which is hosted on the sellers dedicated servers on-site.

Website -
The site is on a Windows 2003 office server.
It has a HTML front end and has been built with a Cold fusion back end.
There is also a SQL database attached.

The actual size of the website is quite small as it has only a small number of real content pages and few graphics .
This is because most of the data consists of uploaded images which change weekly and therefore are irrelevant.
The database is a stock standard SQL type with around 40000 users.

Email -
The email accounts are on a Windows 2003 business office server.
There is no need to transfer actual email data as we have been using
Google mail for the past year. However all email
accounts should be moved over to a web based server with easy admin control. I wil run around 7 accounts.

I want to get all of this on a reliable hosted server, but I am not sure exactly what I am looking for, I have been looking online and there seems to be ALLOT of misinformation with regards to host company's.

Also, I am i talks with IT company's here to assist in the move, quotes for the work vary massively, just how long should this take? Half a day to 3 days I have been quoted at this stage.

I am under time pressure to get this done with no site down time, and obviously I am new to this, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Pauloseven

Pretty much all shared web hosts offer some type of admin control panel and support E-Mail accounts. If you only have 7 accounts don't bother trying to automate the transfer of the accounts, just re-create them on the new host.


Actually it depends a lot on how the original application was written. If the application code is clean and can be configured easily then I would say a day is a reasonable estimate (half a day seems a bit short to me for a completely unknown code base, although perhaps the people providing the quotes are familiar with the code base). If the application coding is messy then I can see it taking 2-3 days to re-program and test (testing will take the majority of the time) the parts of it that need to be fixed in order for it to work in a different server environment.


That really doesn't mean anything. SQL is an extremely loose "standard", if you want your website to work you need to find out exactly what type of SQL server it is using.

First you need to find a host that supports CF and whatever type of SQL server you need. You might actually want to ask in the CF forum about suggestions/considerations for CF hosting. I work with PHP, and finding a host is almost trivial because almost every major host offers at least one version of PHP, and many offer two. I'm not sure how it will be with CF.

Since your application is hosted on Windows my guess is that it uses MSSQL. This will probably limit your choice to windows hosting.