Forum Moderators: phranque
Yesterday my hosting company apparently had a crash, and then restored their backup, which was two days old. I had done a lot of work in those two days, and it was all lost. This is acceptable for my trivial websites, but I can see that my cheap hosting is going to come back to bite me if I don't drop it.
So here's the question:
If I want to use a different company, how do I move all my stuff, including databases, to the new host? The simple answer is to create a backup on the old host, and restore it on the new one. But that's not likely to work, since the backup contains the host information, my accout information, etc. These will be different for the new host, so the site may not work at all if made from information from the old host.
How is this usually handled?
The way I have done it in the past is to get all of the HTML data and all of the database stuff and move it over to the new host. The new host should provide you with an IP or an address so you can confirm that everything is set up correctly. Having a duplicate of your site up before you initiate the DNS switch will protect against any down time for your site. Also, for specific recommendations, I'd contact your new host. Any host worth his salt will be able to give you directions on transitioning to their system from your old one.
Good luck!
Once the domains are under your full control, then you need to open your new hosting account and transfer the sites over. You need to keep the old hosting running as well. If you're dealing with static sites, this is easy. Once the site is present on both servers, switch the nameservers in your domain registrar's control panel. During the transition, visitors could be hitting either server, but as the same content is presented under the same domain name (regardless of location), then it is not duplicate content. Usually within 2 to 3 days, the vast majority of your traffic will be hitting the new server, but you need to keep the old server available until all the traffic has moved over. This will be a maximum of 5 days for human visitors, but spiders such as Googlebot cache DNS for longer, so check your stats to monitor when the traffic has ceased completely on the old server, and that Googlebot et al are spidering the site on the new server. Don't forget email too - for those transitional days, you will need to check mail at both locations.
Once the traffic has fully stopped, ensure that you have deleted everything on the old server, and then cancel the hosting. Allow for a minimum 4 week overlap in case of problems - don't change just before your year's hosting package runs out!
If you have a site with very rapidly-changing content, then you will need to outsource your DNS and reduce the TTL gradually until you can switch servers in less than a minute - but that's not required for most situations.
