Website duplication ?

[hellorent]

Hi all, I had a website built a couple of years ago and it has been active but not used,
Is it possible to copy that site and use it for another domain name as well as keeping
the original one in use, the person who built it is no longer trading so I cant ask
them for another copy, it was built using the "Laravel" system if that makes any difference.

[TonyRPH]

Laravel is a PHP development framework, so the site will be coded in PHP.

To get a true copy of the site, you'll need the PHP framework (which will consist of several files) and you will also need the database (assuming it uses a database - it almost certainly will do).

The only way you can get all this is to have access to the server that the current site is hosted on.

[hellorent]

Thanks for that, it's hosted on tsohost and I do have access to that so assume I should be ok then.

[sunbeam alpine]

You can also try a program called "HTTrack" which copies web sites.

We used this when our website provider went pop and we couldn't access anything. It made a perfect copy which we were able to transfer to another provide.

Worth saying that ours was a very simple static web site. Don't know how good it would be for more complex stuff.

[TonyRPH]

sunbeam alpine said:

You can also try a program called "HTTrack" which copies web sites.

We used this when our website provider went pop and we couldn't access anything. It made a perfect copy which we were able to transfer to another provide.

Worth saying that ours was a very simple static web site. Don't know how good it would be for more complex stuff.

HTTrack will just give the OP static HTML pages of the site, and won't work for a site built around PHP that renders data stored in a database unfortunately,

[CrouchingWayne]

Do you know where you are moving to? Have you tried their support if so?

When I moved from TSO host (a migration not a duplication admittedly) the new host moved everything over on my behalf.

Might be worth a shot.

[jonsp]

Also when you get the new site up and running stick a 301 redirect on the old domain. Your don't want to have the same site available on 2 different domains.

[akirk]

as above, database and code is what you need
database can be exported as a sql dump assuming a MySQL or similar database
code is basically a folder full of files which you can grab with an ftp program, copy down and then copy back up to the new site
import database dump into the new database…

few things to be aware of - connection to database may be different and need changing
version of php / installed modules / settings may be different on the new server - at worst this can mean modifications to every page of code, but not necessarily a huge exercise - depends how the site has been coded

let is know if you need help - we do quite a lot of this for our clients…