Transfering to another hosting service

[missangie]

Hi, I have had a web site for a couple years now. I am having problems with my current web hosting service and would like to switch to another. Can anyone clue me in on what is involved in this? Anything I need to watch out for? I don't want any down time during the switch, how can I avoid this? If someone could give me the basics I would really appreciate it. Thanks

 

[cian]

Hi,
Most hosts will give you little help transferring your site.
What i'd suggest is to get your new host 2-4 weeks before you plan changing, upload your site onto your new hosts servers, take time to debug etc etc then when you change your DNS settings it should change within a couple of days with no downtime.
For actually transferring your site, you could try to zip the whole thing (unix format maybe?), then unzip on your new servers. This is what I have done anyway, worked fine (it was a small site).


É ::

http://www.endamcg.com

 

[s6d]

Hi missangie,

I have recently switched hosting providers and I did pretty much exactly what Cian suggested and I did not experience any downtime.

What I did was sign up with my new hosting provider, transfer my site and then change my DNS settings. As soon as I saw that my domain was resolving to my new host, I cancelled service with my old host.

Hope this helps! Studio6 Designs

http://www.studio6designs.com

 

[Newposter]

I had problems doing this.

I bought my domain and had its DNS managed, as well as hosted, through a company whose initials are

http://wehost.net

in Rhode Island. They crashed for 2 days in the summer of 2001, phone disconnected and no answer to email. When they came back up, they blamed equipment failure. Same thing happened in summer of 2002, at which point I had suspicions as to their solvency. Since my domains were up for renewal in Sept 2002, I transferred them to another registrar in July 2002 and set up my own hosting at home. All worked well. The domains were active on my own server and gone from the hosting company. In August 2002, they billed me for a year's renewal of hosting and domain name on both accounts. Seems I didn't follow their cancellation procedure (a clue should have been that I told them I was transferring away and it even required their authorization). They wouldn't accept telephone or email cancellation. Had to fill out a form on their site (which used email submission!!) and print it out and fax it to them. Still, they didn't cancel the credit card charges. I had to dispute it and it took 2 months to get rid of it. To this day they never returned my phone calls (goes to voice mail) or emails. The BBB has at least one unanswered complaint against them.

Bottom line, make sure you follow the cancellation procedures carefully and document everything. Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[tanderso]

While your website won't generally have "downtime" per se, you will have to juggle both sites for a short period. Even if you ask your host to set your DNS "time to live" to zero (and they actually follow through), it will still take some time for the DNS change to filter to all DNS servers across the internet. Therefore, you may receive visits, orders, and emails to both servers simultaneously for several days. You'll have to come up with a plan to handle and reconcile this. For example, if you run a discussion forum, you may have to manually copy posts from the old server over to the new server in order to maintain the continuity of discussion until all visitors' domain servers are pointing to the new host. You'll also have to check both email boxes. Moreover, you'll have to change any reference to the domain in your FTP, email, SSH, and other software to the IP address instead. This is because the domain will first point to the old host, then the new one, so you may not know which one you're currently looking at unless you specify the IP address instead of the domain name. Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[missangie]

Awesome! I think I've got all my bases covered now. Thanks for your help!
Cheers

 

[cian]

As for forums, i'd actually close the forum for 2 days "for maintenance". Do it at the quietest time (weekends?) and do it a half-day (?) after you changed your DNS settings.
Ok, not a great solution but if you have a busy forum it's "difficult" to transfer. Unless your forum uses text file (such as YaBB) then you can just zip 'em and transfer them!


É ::

http://www.endamcg.com