Moving Ecommerce Site To A New Host

Good or bad?

[WolfLover]

I want to move my store which has been with the same host since 2006. Business is down but still do get visitors and sales.

I've never moved a store to a new host and the urls will be different. So when a visitor goes to click on a link and I assume it will bring them to a 404 page?

What is the best way to do this without losing what little traffic I still have?

Any tips or tricks? What has your experience been?

[Peter_S]

I assume that it means that you do not own the site's domain name ?

[lucy24]

I've never moved a store to a new host and the urls will be different.

Why would they be? Hosting and URLs are entirely different things--unless you're concurrently switching to a different CMS that uses different names and a different navigation structure. Come back and explain some more about (a) what you need to do (for example, old host is going out of business, or some aspect of their service has become unacceptable) and (b) what you want to do (“I hate my old name and my navigation is a mess”).

If, as suggested above, your current domain name belongs to the host rather than to you ... then yup, that's a solid reason for changing. The sooner the better.

In most situations it's probably best to separate the two things--the change in URLs, and the physical move to a new server. First get set up on the new site with its new URLs, and redirect everything from the old site, which is still running for the sole purpose of serving its page-for-page redirects. Then, after a solid period of time--I'd say a minimum of six months--you can let the old hosting expire.

[seanjose]

It's better to go for new hosting company, nothing wrong in that.

But you have to check the following things:
Are they providing the best customer support?
Are they having servers globally?
What is their latency time?
Are they compatible with cloud hosting?
etc.,

Customer support is the first choice and good loading speed is the second choice.

[WolfLover]

Yes, I own the domain name. The reason the urls would be different because the current host uses an url like this www.mydomainname.com/items/department-name/product-name.htm

I'm going to go with Shopify which have urls like this: www.mydomainname.com/products/product-name and does not have an ending like .htm

So the urls will be different even with the same domain name and even if I name the products exactly the same way as on my current host.

Sorry if I did not make it clearer. Any suggestions?

[tangor]

lucy24 outlined what is necessary. Redirect from the old to the new. Set your new up first so you know what to redirect TO from the OLD. The url names mean nothing as you will be redirecting

old/folder/file.ext to new/folder/file

The end user won't see a difference and the search engines will make the changes after indexing.