Transferring to a new web host provider can be a daunting and complex task, with many areas of risks that must be planned around. This article will both prepare you to tackle this task and provide you with a checklist of needed steps. With proper planning and preparation you can transfer to a new web host provider with virtually no downtime nor noticeable effect on your website users.
There are many reasons why you may be considering a new web host for your website. More often then not it is several things that push you past your frustration limit, but a single problem that is of enough significance can do it as well. Here is a brief list of problems that can arise:
- Billing irregularities - and failure to promptly correct any problems you discover
- Website uptime - inadequate bandwidth to your server or server bouncing
- Sluggish network response time - inadequate bandwidth to your server or over populated server
- Ineffective technical support - unable to communicate promptly or inadequate technical skills
- Lack of features - the package you currently have is missing or lacks enough features for you growing website
- Expense - you did not realize that the cheap website you purchased is only cheap the first year
Here are the required steps to accomplish a smooth transfer to a new web host provider.
- Selecting a new host provider
- Gather all required information
- Backup up current website
- Restoring to new website
- Testing
- Notifications
- Transferring DNS
- Turning off old account
- Updating applications
1. Selecting a new host provider
With careful research and shopping around, you can find a new web host provider to transfer your website too. Make sure you research the network response time, customer reviews, available packages, and pricing carefully. The problem that you experienced with your current provider will most likely be the primary concern for you, but also research the other areas - you do not want to simply trade in one set of problems for another! You should also think about what features you will need in the future as your website grows so that you can find a provider with a clear upgrade path to meet your future needs.
Also realize that all of the companies say that they are customer focused and have excellent technical support departments, but they are not all equal. I suggest you actually call their pre-sales phone numbers and ask a few difficult questions to help you discern who is actually capable of handling the specific problems you are concerned about.
To make as smooth a transition as possible you should choose a hosting plan with similar features as your current package. You should ensure that if your website requires a specific scripting language or a database type that the new hosting plan supports those features.
2. Gather all required information
You will need to be able to login into your registrar account and change the name server entries to point your hostname to a new IP address. Quite often people will register their domain names with a separate hostname provider than their website host provider, and they have to go through special steps to get their long forgotten login credentials back. If you have forgotten your own name service login credentials or host site, you can perform a query on whois.org for your website name and get the information.
You will need to be able to update the name server, or DNS (Domain Name Server), on your domain registration account to point to the new DNS names on your new hosting service. This means that you need to find where to update the DNS entries inside of your domain registration account management, and you will also need to find what the new name servers are on the new hosting provider. Typically there are 2, and they are usually named NS1 and NS2 followed by the name of the provider.
You do not want to actually perform the name server change yet, just need to be ready with the procedure to perform the change later in this process.
You also need to gather credential information of your old website and write them down. You will need email logins, database logins, and website logins used by your website. Some of these may be difficult to track down because the passwords may be in hidden fields, which mean you may need to build new logins on your new host for those accounts. You should still research and find what your website needs to as far as credentials and where they are configured so that you can rebuild them later.
3. Backup up current website
A complete backup of everything in your current website is needed - you should be performing this on a regular basis anyway for emergencies. This backup is going to be used to actually transfer the contents of your website to the new host, so you will need everything - including website pages, website configuration, database structure and data, and email mailboxes.
Moving some of these may prove to be difficult depending on the options available to you on your current and future web hosting provider. Not all of them provide complete backup and restore features, so further research is needed into how to accomplish this on the providers. If the providers are running full featured and well known control panels, such as cPanel or Plesk, then you will be able to perform a complete backup and restore easily.
If you do not have access to everything that is needed in the move, then you will need to perform a manual backup of the pieces, as much as you can. You may be forced to lose some information such as the old emails in your mail boxes. If you are not able to backup and restore email mailboxes then you need to make sure you notify those that will be impacted so they are made aware of the pending loss.
At the very least you need to make sure you do get your website source, configuration, and database. The website source should be easy enough - it is a complete copy of the all the html, php, aspx, perl, or whatever pages comprise your website. The configuration is the .config files, .htaccess (unix), or web.config (windows) files. The database can be manually backed up by using phpMyAdmin (MySql) or Query Analyzer (SQL Server). Research the exact steps to follow to do the database manually, but make sure you get the structure and the data backed up.
After performing this backup it would be best, if you have the ability, to lock down your website from further additions and modifications. Depending on what your website is doing this may be easy or difficult. If you are accepting online financial transactions or have a high volume message board, it may be best to take the shopping cart and new posting features offline for a day. If you are unable or unwilling to take the pieces of you website down for the move, or you are unsure how long the move will take, then you should take this backup and perform the restore and testing steps to familiarize yourself with the process once. Then come back again to this step and do it again as quickly as possible with a forced down time of the entire site while you perform the final move.
4. Restoring to new website
In this step you will take the backup above and restore it to your new host provider. The easiest way is to find the default page that is loaded for your account and replace it with all of the files and folders needed for your website. There may be an option to upload a backup to your new host provider control panel, which will make things easier, but you also have the option to ftp the files up into the location where the default page is stored. Either way, be aware that you are mounting your website up and will be accessing it short-term through an IP address or a temporary DNS name until you move your real website name over to point to this new hosting account.
If the database restore is not automated then you will need to manually restore the database. Using either phpMyAdmin or Query Analyzer you will need to run the database scripts to build out your data structure and then insert all of the data into the tables from your backup. You will also need to build database login accounts for you website that you collected in step #2. If you were not able to see the passwords because they were hidden on your old website account, then you will need to create new logins and put the credential information into the website component configuration that needs the database.
5. Testing
At this point you should be able to go the temporary website name or IP address of you new website and be able to use the website completely. There might be a few problems encountered - some of the website code might be referencing the complete URL of the website instead of local paths, which may lead to some frustration around cross-site scripting. It is best if the website source never actually reference the website address itself, but changing a lot of html and source files may be a tall order for you to undertake.
If you run into these types of problems, you will need to work around them by manually checking the references. For instance, if you find a page that fails to load an image that you expect, it may be that the image reference is hardcoded to yourwebsitename address and the remote site does not allow image sharing. You will need to take the yourwebsitename/somedirectory/image.file address, swap out your yourwebsitename with the new website IP or temporary name, and verify that the image will load correctly. Do not do this in the source code, just do it in a new browser window.
6. Notifications
You should notify everyone that manages any part of your website of the pending change of hosting providers. This includes anyone that is using your email server, third party developers, or shopping cart services that you are using to handle payments. All of these people may be using IP address that will definitely change, and login credentials may also be changing with the move. If the move is performed smoothly then they will most likely not need to change anything, but you should at least make them aware of the potential impact and be ready to provide them with further details if they run into problems.
7. Transferring DNS
By this step you are comfortable that the new website is running smoothly and it is ready to be opened up for traffic. Log into your domain name registration account and update the old name servers to the new name servers. This update then has to propagate throughout the entire internet, which typically takes up to 24 hours.
During this time both websites will be running, but you do not want any new activity on your old website, since that activity will be lost completely. You should turn off the shopping cart, discussion board new posts, and any other component of the website that allows users to add new content or perform any transaction. If you are unable to disable those features of the old website, then you may want to take the entire site down or place a big warning on the main page or banners about this pending cutover.
If you are unsure if the http://www.yoursite.com address is pointing to the new web hosting site, you can make a small change to the home page that only appears on the new site. Good examples are to put the word "new" in the footer of the site or place an html comment in the code.
8. Turning off old account
Now that you have completed the transfer you need to notify your old hosting provider that the site can be turned off. Make sure you have everything you need off of the site, and also recommend you remove any financial or customer data off of the site manually. After you notify them they may delete the files quickly to make room for other customer data, so make sure you are ready to lose all of the data and source.
Also be sure and remember to notify them that you do not want to continue the account in the future. Quite often the hosting providers will auto subscribe your account for another year, hit your credit card, and you are left with paying for another year of service for a dead account that you do not want.
9. Updating applications
Now you need to sweep through your suite of tools you use to manage your website and read your email, updating them to make sure you have correct credentials and IP addresses. This also includes updating your shortcuts in your browser that may be pointing to the old web hosting account. You may not be updating very much at all depending on the breadth of your management suite and restoring of credentials you were able to perform.
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