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There comes a time for nearly every person who uses web hosting services that they will have to change hosts. This occurs for a variety of reasons, from the host completely disappearing in the dead of night, to your needs outgrowing the capabilities and service of that particular company.
Or it could be the number one reason most people change: poor customer service. Whatever your reason, there are a number of things you’ll want to make sure you know how to do, to ensure a seamless migration to your new site, with no downtime for your website at all. Let’s examine some of these items.
Back Up Your Site – This is a must-do. Whether you do a physical backup or do it online, (or preferably both!) this is the number one essential to make sure you get done. More than one person before you has failed to perform this step, and has paid with the loss of their site, when files weren’t transferred successfully and the old host deleted said files from their servers. Not a place you want to go.
Besides backing up your static pages, folders, scripts, images and web templates, if you are using a blog or another Content Management System (CMS), then you will also likely have to make backups of your databases. Make sure if you have any interactive web page elements, like a forum you turn it off and put up a “Performing Scheduled Maintenance” page, or something similar. This will ensure that no data is missed during transfer.
Transfer Your Files – Once you’ve got everything safely backed up, you can begin the actual physical transfer of data. Your new host will give you a temporary domain to transfer into. Be aware that this will not accommodate PHP and other code types. If you need to see your pages with these codes, ask for a temporary real domain, or subdomain. They should be able to do this for you. Then simply FTP your files, images, folders and databases to your new host. Once this is done you should have two versions of your site on the Web. Now you are ready to move the domain name itself.
Changing Your Nameservers – Once your site is safely on the new host, you are ready to change where the domain actually resides on the Web. You do this by changing the nameservers at the company where you bought your domain. (Another good case for NOT buying domains from web hosts, in case you need to move)
You go to the domain registrar and change the DNS nameservers to the new ones that point to your new host. Your new host will provide these. The standard line is that it takes 24-48 hours for the changes to be totally done, but it rarely takes that long.
The last things you’ll want to do are turn back on any dynamic content such as blogs, forums, comments etc. The last thing you’ll need to do is cancel the old web hosting account. I would give this at least a week to ten days, just in case there are any problems. Most of the time it is a straightforward process, but you don’t want to be the exception!
