Moving Web Hosts – What you need to know!

Recently I was helping a client move from one host to another. After going through this experience a couple of times with various clients, I thought I would write down my experiences so one might know the steps to move a site from one hosting company to another.

1. You will need to get copies of your existing files. This is best done my getting them from your existing host. This may be done via FTP. In some cases you can download the files from the site, but more modern sites will run Content Management Systems, or Blogging software, which does not exist as simple files on your site.
2. Secure a new hosting server.
3. Transfer your files to the new host. I generally do this for my clients if they request it.
4. Test the new server to make sure everything is working correctly. In the last conversion, the old site used a couple of files specific to that server. We had to make changes so the contact forms would still work.
5. Update the Name Server entries for your Domain Name. This is generally done through where you register your domain name, such as Go Daddy, Network Solutions, etc. Your new host will give you this information.

What you might expect

Most of the time, moving a website from one server to another is straight forward, and there is no issues. However, from time to time there are issues, and they will fall into one of two categories: Technical or Business.

Technical Issues

Well developed sites will run into few technical issues. Sometimes a configuration file will need to be updated so resources are correctly pointed to, sometimes in rare cases, you may have to reinstall a web application for it to work properly. However, in more recent times, this is becoming less and less of an issue.

Business Issues

Business Issues are things that I see periodically. In some cases, it is how the original hosting company has their servers configured (like a mail script which will not work if its not on their server).  Other times, they don’t want to lose the business, so they will try to scare you into staying. This is what happened with the last move I helped perform.

The old host claimed the client would lose search engine ranking, and had little chance of getting it back. The Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing!, etc.) know that people move websites every day. They won’t penalize you if you move from one host to another.

The original hosting company claimed to have links on over 10,000 pages for the client that would all disappear. If your host is saying that you will lose a bunch of links, it means they are managing those links, and they are most likely considered low quality by Google and other Search Engines, so they are doing little if anything for your search ranking. If your host gives you information like this, ask to see some of the pages which have these links. Working with the client, we asked the hosting provider, and never got an answer. This leads us to believe that the links were automatically generated, and therefore of low quality.

What Did Happened

What did happen was nothing to write home about. We followed the five steps from above, and after dealing with the hosting company, we got the site successfully transferred. It took about 2 days to move and test the server, and it took another day in dealing with the old host, but otherwise – it went as most transfers do: that is with out incident.