Rebuild of a website for the Queens Hotel York

First of all I had to figure out how to set up the domain at my preferred host Allsimple, without actually purchasing a domain from them. As always my contact at Allsimple was incredibly helpful and guided me through the process of navigating their set up screens.

Here is what I did step by step:

1) Samantha (the manager) and I sat down together on Wednesday 3rd Dec 2025 and opened a new hosting package at Allsimple.net. During this process we specified that we did not need a domain name and we would use our own existing domain.

2) I then set up an FTP session and published my new site and copied over the CMS data from my sandbox site. Obviously at this point I could not see the results of publishing it so I was potentially publishing blind.

3) However, my really helpful contact at Allsimple reminded me about a simple trick to point my Mac at the site as follows:

From the Terminal app on my Mac I typed: sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

From there I added a line at the bottom that read: 45.nnn.nn.nn queenshotel-york.com

where 45.nnn.nn.nn is the IP address of the new server and queenshotel-york.com is the existing domain name we wanted to use. I then saved this, shut down the Terminal app and rebooted.

What this did is that for my Mac (and only my Mac), if I went to queenshotel-york.com in a browser it pointed to my new published site and I was no longer working blind. Everyone else sees the old site. (You just need to remember this code is there in the hosts file and remove it again when you don't need it).

Also bear in mind also that although this works in the browsers I use I did find a couple of apps where it did not work (Rank Tracker being one of them).

I was then able to see all the CMS content, test out the CMS, work on setting up SEO data and working through my usual Go-live checklist before giving the IT company controlling the old hosting the go-ahead to switch IP addresses on the A records.

4) Although I tried to register my TCMS licence whilst my Mac was being fooled into redirecting to the new hosting as above - the registration didn't work. It was saying 'Invalid Licence' which confused me a bit. I checked all the usual things. Did I have the same licence code in each of the Admin Core stacks and in the CMS Core swatch? I also downloaded a list of all my licences. Apparently I'm up to 77!

I tried again to register the TCMS licence once the change to the A records had taken effect and it still failed with 'Invalid Licence'. I thought maybe I should give it the full 48 hours recommended when making DNS changes for them to propagate fully.

Then on Friday 5th Dec Joe came through with 'That should work now! Give it a shot.' and I did and it worked! A huge sigh of relief from me and thumbs up from the Queens Hotel manager who now has a working dynamic site which is a million miles away from the previous static site that was built 20 years ago before responsive sites were invented I reckon.

She is excited that she can add events happening in York and also the many attractions that visitors may enjoy. I realise that I will have to help her find better images for some of the posts as a few of them have very small sized photos but at the moment I know the hotel is full and she is likely to be maxed out with work so I'll address that one in the new year.

If you are requested to do this and you are not sure how to proceed then please get in touch and I'm happy to walk you through it

https://queenshotel-york.com