Download your site and host it elsewhere

While the option to download your sites is available, we recommend that you carefully consider the advantages of hosting your site with us instead.  We cannot guarantee that you will be successful with self publishing. If you host your site elsewhere:

1. Yola generates sites in PHP - which are tested to run correctly on our servers.  If you elect to host your site elsewhere, your hosting server needs to be running PHP 5.2x or higher
2. If there are any errors with uploading your site, we will not be able to assist you.
3. Hosting with us is free, whereas you most likely will have to pay to host your site elsewhere.
4. If you host your site with us, we can support you if anything goes wrong. We are committed to ensuring excellent uptime for our published sites.  Even when our site builder is down for maintenance, published sites remain up.  If any unforeseen problems do occur, a team of experts will work quickly and diligently to solve them!
5. Updating your site is much easier if you host it with us.
6. If you have a blog on your site, self publishing is particularly problematic, and we do not recommend it at all.

If you still decide that you want to host your site elsewhere, here are the instructions:

1. Click on the down-arrow next to the yellow "Publish my Site" button.
2. Click on "Download site"
   
   
3. You will then be able to download your site as a zipped file and you will be given the following instructions:

Hosting with your own service provider:
Copy the site to the webroot of a php 5.2.x enabled web server.
* Ensure that the "classes/work/templates_c" directory is writable by the web server (chmod 777 classes/work/templates_c on Unix / Linux boxes)
* Ensure that your host supports Sqlite3 if you have a blog on your site.

Please note: if you elect to host your site elsewhere, we can only support you with the process of creating your site, and downloading it. Thereafter all support relating to the hosting of your site will become the sole responsibility of your service provider.  While we provide the option to download your site and host it elsewhere, we cannot guarantee that our downloaded sites will run on other hosting servers.

The site you built will always be available in your Yola account for editing and updating even if you download your site as a zipped file and host it elsewhere. However, to put your changes live you would need to re-download your site and re-upload it to the servers of your hosting provider each time. If you host your site with us (either using a free subdomain or a domain of your own) you can update it with a single click - so it is a lot easier to make changes.

Known bug with self-publishing:

We currently have a bug with the domain.info file being incorrectly attached to the zip file of your site when you download it.  We are working on a fix for this.

In the meantime here is a workaround:

1. After downloading your site - unzip it.
2. Delete the file called "domain.info"

You should then be able to upload it to your webhost and your domain will not redirect back to Yola.