If, for whatever reason, you decide that you need to change your Website Hosting Provider you need to plan the exercise carefully. There are three basic scenarios:
You own your Domain Name which is registered with a third party domain registration service and you want to change web hosting services.
You own your Domain Name but your domain registration service is also your present website hosting provider and you want to change just your host or you might want to change both.
You don’t own your present URL and will be changing your URL as part of the process of changing website hosting provider.
There is a need to check the steps for the changing of the website providers. Instead of looking for other plans, you can pick godaddy alternative to get the similar results. As a result, there is no reduction in the quality of the services. The satisfaction of the needs and requirements is possible for clients.
In this article I will be looking at the first scenario as here, with careful planning, you will be able to change your website hosting provider without visitors noticing. The others are more complicated and may involve some downtime or loss of visitors.
Of course the easiest way to change hosts is to let your new host do it for you. If you use WordPress, several hosting providers (including HostGator) will transfer a site for you free of charge if you are a new customer.
If you need to do it yourself proceed as follows:
- Step 1 – Full Backups
Copy all the files on your web server to your PC via FTP. If using a database driven blog or site backup the database to your PC.
- Step 2 – Set-up New Site
Set-up your account with the new website hosting provider and copy the site from your PC to the new host and if appropriate restore your data files to a new database.
Create new email accounts taking care to ensure they are exactly the same as the current ones.
- Step 3 – Check Out the New Site
Thoroughly test the new version of the site to make sure everything works as before (put the new IP address in your local Hosts file so that your computer sees the new site). It is also a good idea at this point to make some change to the home page so that you can easily see that this is the version with the new Website Hosting Provider.
- Step 4 – Change the DNS Records
Enter the name servers of your new website hosting provider against the domain name with your domain name registrar. The change should be complete within 48 hours but to be sure wait a few days longer. During the changeover period some visitors will see the new site and some the old site but they will not notice any change. Importantly neither will the search engines so your rankings will not be affected.
- Step 5 – Cancel Existing Hosting
Only now cancel your account with the old website hosting provider, if you time this right it should mean only one month of paying two website hosting companies.
