Migrating Windows Classic accounts: FrontPage & Access end of support

Over the coming weeks, we're migrating customers using IIS 6-based Windows Classic hosting accounts to new servers. If you use Microsoft FrontPage® or Access® databases, your website will be affected.

How can I tell if my website is being migrated?

We'll email customers who are affected, but you can look tell if your account is impacted by viewing its version of IIS (more info). All accounts using IIS 6 will be migrated to a new server that uses IIS 7.

How will this impact my website?

The new servers do not support the following features:

  • FrontPage Extensions
  • Access databases

If your website doesn't use either of these features, your website will not be impacted.

FrontPage details

After your account has been migrated, any features that require FrontPage extensions will stop working, but your website will remain live.

Alternatives

Microsoft stopped supporting FrontPage in 2009, so we recommend finding another alternative to maintaining your websites.

However, if you want to continue using FrontPage, you can do so but without using FrontPage Extensions by publishing your site through File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Access databases

After your account has been migrated, your Access databases (MDB file) will remain on your hosting account in the access_db directory, but it will not function.

Any part of your website that relies on the database will begin generating errors. To prevent this, we recommend moving to another database platform immediately.

Alternatives

Access databases were not designed for use with websites and cause a lot of performance issues. We recommend moving to either MySQL or MS SQL. If your database was simple enough to use Access, you can use either platform but we recommend MySQL.

You can find information about moving from Access to MySQL by looking up the topic in Google.