Web Hosting
GUIDE

Changing Web Hosts

Description: It sounds simple in practice, but if you have taken the time to build a worthwhile site which gets lots of traffic it's in your best interests to make sure the change is as smooth as possible. Read on to find out why.

Put simply, you pay your web host to put your website online where everyone can see it. If you stop paying them, they stop hosting it. That's easy enough to understand, which is why you need to be extremely careful when it comes to changing your host.

It's more than possible to do it of course, but you need to make sure you can make the change over as fast and as smooth as possible, to ensure your site is down for the minimum amount of time and you don't run into problems with the search engines. Unfortunately if the search engine spiders are out and about and can't access your site for an amount of time your search engine rankings could suffer, which is why you need to make sure the change over happens as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

Perhaps the most important place to begin is by making sure you have several copies of your whole site backed up onto your computer and onto disk. If something goes wrong you can't rely on your current web host to have a copy. Back up and back up again.

The easiest way to ensure that nothing major goes wrong is to keep your old web host on board until you have found your new one and start using their service. Don't try and discontinue one service on the same day as you start the new one. It won't cost you too much extra in hosting fees to keep both going to ease the stress of the cross over period.

As far as moving your domain name is concerned, if you are going to do this you should do it last. It might seem a strange way of doing things but it's actually much easier this way. It gives you a chance to get the new site settled with its new host before attaching your domain name to it again.