How To Change Your Web Hosting Provider - Step-By-Step Guide
Whether you are disgruntled with the level of service
your current web hosting provider, or you have discovered
a provider that offers you better deal, or your online business
has simply outgrown your present provider, any reason is
as good as any for changing your web hosting provider. The
only concern is how to switch your web site from a web host
to another in the right way and no or as little aggravations
as possible.
The very first step in changing web hosting providers is
to find one that meets all your requirements. Although you
should have some experience in finding one from your last
search, let's still review the main issues when choosing
one. Take a good look at the disk space and bandwidth your
future plan will provide you. As you web site's bandwidth
requirements may grow in time, purchase a little more than
you need and take a good look at the costs of the bandwidth
for exceeding your traffic quota. Also make sure that the
new web hosting provider will offer you the same tools and
installed software as your previous old one. Ask the technical
support if the software or scripts in the offer are already
installed and configured. It would be a bad experience to
find out after you have completely migrated your web site
that not everything is working properly just because the
not all the software in the offer comes pre-installed and
you should have requested its activation. All these are
very important and ensure you don't have to go through this
whole procedure of changing web hosts real soon in the future.
Sign up for the new hosting plan. It sounds obvious, but
the thing you should look after is sign up for the new one
while still having about two weeks until your old hosting
plan expires. This will give you time to react if anything
goes wrong during the migration of your web site and will
smoothen the transition for your visitors or customers,
your business enjoying as much continuity as possible.
Update your backup copy of your web site - you do have
backups don't you? If not this is a very good place to start
with. Best thing would be to have a backup copy of your
web site burned onto a compact disk CD and store this CD
into a safe location. Your backup will include the entire
web site: files, images, directory structure, databases.
Upload your web site to the web servers of your new web
hosting provider.
Now it is testing time. Most web hosting providers will
offer you the possibility to preview your web site before
it goes live. Use this feature to test if your web site
looks good and its functionalities are all intact on your
new web server.
Continue by configuring your existing e-mail accounts on
the new web server. It would be a good idea to write down
the new POP3 and SMTP you will be using soon.
If you haven't changed your web site design with this move,
it will be a good idea to put mark the web pages on your
new web server just o differentiate from the old one. In
this way you will be able to tell when your DNS information
is updated, which is the next step of migrating your web
site.
It's time to change your name server. As anxious you might
be to transfer, it would be a very good thing to announce
your visitors and customers about the imminent change of
web hosting providers you are making and to apologize for
any possible inconveniences of downtime your web site might
encounter. I don't need to tell you how important this announcement
is for the overall image of your web business.
Now you can announce your registrar to change your DNS
information, or if you can change it yourself, go ahead
and do it.
All you have to do now is wait for the DNS information
to propagate across all the DNS servers. This entire process
could take as much as 72 hours to complete, but it is possible
to start seeing the first results after a couple of hours.
Final step would be to update the e-mail client you are
using to match the new POP3 and SMTP settings.
You have successfully changed your web hosting provider.
Good luck with the new one!
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