Forum Moderators: phranque
I have a domain hosted by a company. They also registered my domain name.
I checked on whois on nominet and it gives my business as the registrant - but the registrant's address is the web host company.
I checked with nominet and they agree this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs and have asked me send them paperwork (invoices etc) so they change change it to my address.
This company charges £94 for two years' domain upkeep charge.Obviously a ripoff.
I also, obviously, pay them to host the site.
My main email account has been with a sister company of theirs for about 6 years - so any email to my domain is forwarded there.
As it stands, things run fairly smoothly apart from the odd downtime.I get loads of spam on my dialup account though because my email account is fairly easy to spam.
My question is this. If I were to transfer my domain name to another company, would this cause problems?
Also, if I were transfer hosting to this other company would this too cause problems?
Should I do the first and not the second?
I do very well in the search rankings and would be loath to jeopardise anything. Would Google still find my www.widgets.co.uk if I transferred or are there inherent dangers in moving? This is why I am tempted to leave things as they are.
Sorry if this is naive but you can see how paranoid this stuff makes you!
Thanks for any help.
>>transfering hosting
also no big deal. The real key here is that there is no down time. I would secure the new hosting and get a copy of the site up and running on your account there (just on the IP address) once you are confident the new site is fully functional you can go ahead and get the nameserver info for your domain changed to point it at the new site. This will ensure no down time and Google et al will happily crawl away as usual. I've even heard that switching to a new IP can occasionally trigger a deep crawl from Google.
Appreciate the advice.
Diggle
Plan to keep the old site up for a month or so after the new site is on-line. Google has been reported to be very slow about updating their DNS cache, so it would be a good idea to plan to have both servers up with at least a month of overlap. Once you see your new server get deep-crawled and an update happens, then you can then drop the old account.
So the secret to moving is, plan some overlap and don't tell the old host anything until the move is completed and the new server has been found by Googlebot, crawled, and everything looks good in the updated search results.
Best,
Jim
