Are You Planning On Changing Your Web Hosting Company?

Posted in Hosting, How To, WebMaster by DB

So it’s that time again. You just realized your current web hosting provider just does not cut it. It’s time to move your hosting account with all your sites or site to another company. If you are doing this for the first time then you’re probably wondering what you need to be doing. Let’s take this step by step.

First ofcourse is finding another web hosting plan from a decent hosting company. Be clear on exactly what you are getting from your new hosting provider before you sign up. Weigh carefully whether a monthly plan or a yearly plan is best for your business.

Once you’ve found the plan that suits you best, its time for the move. It is relatively easy if you have a static website. All you would need to do is setup your new hosting account, transfer all your website files over and finally create all your email id’s over at the new hosting account and you are good to go. Change the DNS for your website at your domain registrar and in a couple of days all requests to your website will be served by the new hosting account. I would cancel your previous hosting account only after a week of your website DNS switching over to the new hosting account.

As a website owner you are doing this to prevent the following.

  1. Avoid having your website users find your site down. Nothing puts off a user than finding a site down.
  2. Avoid losing any emails that is sent during your hosting migration exercise.
  3. Avoid getting penalized by search engines. Yes, search engines can remove your site from the rankings if they find that your site is not active. While the period before a search engine applies this penalty is usually 48 hrs, why take a chance.

Infact this point reminds me of the issue that some of the competitors are facing in the Busby SEO Challenge. Pogung’s busby seo challenge is seemingly hit with bandwidth issues and often is found to be down. While this could be a tactic from a competing team trying to sabotage his position it has not affected his ranking yet though for the first time I have seen some fluctuations around the top.

Back to hosting and moving web hosting companies. If you are running a dynamic site as in a site that captures information from users such as running a ecommerce site or you run a popular forum or blog, moving hosting companies is a bigger deal. A lot of thought and care has to be exercised to make the move seamless to the end user.

I will tackle the best options for moving a dynamic website between hosting providers in a later article. If you are looking to move your blog, you probably would be interested in my previous article that talks about moving your blog to another hosting company.

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One Response

  1. SEO Checklist For Your Website Redesign | Web Hosting | Plans, Tips and Strategies Says:
    August 24th, 2008 at 12:45 pm

    [...] The key point to keep in mind while doing this is to keep your downtime to a minimum. If you can move your website hosting company without any downtime then nothing like [...]

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