Home | Site Map           
   
     

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!

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (http://www.hostpinpin.com ), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory. HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting articles, tips, web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans, free web hosting guide, free hosting quote, web hosting glossary and more.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the "About" and "weblinks" are kept intact.


MORE RESOURCES:

Yahoo! News Search Results for URL
Yahoo! News Search Results for URL

AdWords URL Longer Than 35 Characters Need Exception (Search Engine Roundtable)
We discussed the Google AdWords policy on a max URL character space of 35 in the past. They recently started enforcing this rule back in June of this year. A new Google Groups thread has an issue where on advertiser needs to have a display URL that is longer than 35 characters. So what can he/she do? AdWordsPro Sarah says that you can submit an exception. In short, make your display ...
YouTube videos go HD with a simple hack (CNET)
Want to host high-definition videos on YouTube? No problem. Just get your copy-and-paste skills ready because all it requires is changing the video's URL!
High-definition videos sneaking onto YouTube (Ars Technica)
YouTube is experimenting with high-definition videos on its site, and you can access the capability using a handy URL trick. If YouTube manages to score enough movie and TV content from its owners, then it might eventually give Hulu some competition. Read More...
The Sound of Personal Branding (Fast Company Magazine)
Some websites need to be arrested for audial assault. You know the ones I mean. No sooner do you click on a URL but the site blasts out some atrocious music that has absolutely nothing to do with the brand. If marketer and music extraordinaire ...
Sorry: The requested page could not be found (Kerrville Daily Times)
You may have received this message in error. Please try loading the page you were trying to access again. If you got here by typing a URL, or web address, please make sure the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are correct.
Why Firefox Rocks: Great Firefox Tricks, Part IV (LinuxPlanet)
Today I have a useful tip that used to be enabled only on Linux, but now is available for everyone. Have you ever had somebody send you a URL to a web site, only it's so long that the mail system has broken it into several lines?
Mobispine making Telia MMS app for iPhone? (MacNN)
The identity of TeliaSonera's MMS application for the iPhone may have already been revealed, an announcement hints. Mobispine has announced the creation of what it calls the "world's first true MMS for the iPhone;" critically, the software relies on the actual MMS protocol instead of a substitute, such as a text message with an embedded URL. The company is also based in Sweden like Telia, and ...
Site of the Day (AskMen)
Don't be fooled by the URL, this isn't just a blog for rail-thin fashionites.
CORRECTING and REPLACING China Energy Recovery Board Member, Roger Ballentine...
SHANGHAI, China----URL in second graph, second sentence of release should read: www.eenews.net/tv/
Giz Explains: Every Video Format You Need to Know [Giz Explains] (Gizmodo)
digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Giz_Explains_Every_Video_Format_You_Need_to_Know'; Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only...

 

 

Foto Log | Perfect Laptop | Webdesign Place

Copyright © 2008 All Rights Reserved URLMaster.com