Moving website to another server

Best method to avoid IP & DNS problems with Google

[Imaster]

I had a question and was hoping that someone could help me. I am planning to move my website to a new server (under a different IP), and needed the exact steps to follow so as to avoid getting in trouble with Google and other search engines. I remember last time I had moved servers, I had some problems with Google catching on to the new IP and DNS. Even after moving to new server, it was still referring from the old server and my sites were displaying apache default page in the serps.

I know there are quite a few threads out there, but I am unable to find the most recent discussion on this issue. Could anyone just give me an overview on the best method to follow while changing servers, or if you could just point me to a good discussion, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

[coopster]

Post #6 by claus in this thread regarding Site change of URL [webmasterworld.com] was very good.

[Imaster]

Hi coopster,

Thanks for the link. But that post looks like someone is changing the entire domain name. In my case, I am not changing the domain name, but just migrating the whole website to a new server.

Any advice?

Thanks!

[ncw164x]

I put a new server online with a new IP number about 6 weeks ago, googlebot and all of the other spiders did not have a problem and found the sites the next day but inktomi took just over 3 weeks to start deep spidering again.

[ciml]

Last time I had to do this I used the following process.

1) Set up the sites at the new domain; test.

2) Switch the DNS

3) Leave old hosting in place for 30 days.

4) IP forwarding from old IPs to new IPs for 60 days. Both the new server's TCP/IP subsystems and Apache saw the traffic as coming on the new IPs so they didn't reject anything. The secondary DNS server (our upstream) were given the DNS information as DNS lookups couldn't be forwarded.

Four comments.

1) You can only do this if you have dedicated IPs.

2) This would probably have been considered overkill, even back then. I didn't care as it would have cost too much to loose those listings.

3) Imaster wants the fresh content to get into Google quickly, so IP forwarding would probably be better than mirroring.

4) This was almost 18 months ago; Google cache DNS far less aggressively now so there's a good chance of having no problems even without contingency plans.

[Imaster]

Hi Ciml,

Thanks for your help.

1) I don't have a dedicated IP for the site which I want to move. I am hosting around 5-6 sites on the same IP on the old server.

2) How do you do IP forwarding?

3) I hope Google caches DNS less aggressively now. Fingers crossed.

I am planning on doing the following:

1) copy the site to the new dedicated server and test it using a test domain.

2) If everything works fine, then switch the DNS to the new server and leave the old server's settings as they were. I believe this would lead all the direct users to the new server and if google or any other search engines cache DNS for a long time, they would probably still get the site from the old server.

3) My question here is: how soon would google learn that my site now has a different IP and exists on a different server.

4) What's the cache behavior of other search engines like inktomi and alltheweb.

Thanks a lot for all your help, Ciml.

[ciml]

IP forwarding is performed at router-level by your (previous) provider. If other customers share your IPs, then it isn't going to happen. Your old Web server could perform HTTP proxying I suppose.

I think your plan is sensible. I can't say how soon Google would see the DNS change, only that it's much sooner now than in the past and that very few people seem to have problems now.

I don't know about other search engines, you'll need to ask in the right places.

[Abigail]

I don't know if this helps you or not, but, I moved one site's hosting in August, Googlebot was spidering my first pages within hours. Ink took longer and am now seeing the slurp and others come to visit. I am going to leave the old service in place for another month. I can't see what's happening in the old logs because the old service is having technical issues that prevent that access.

On another note - the first went well so I moved a second smaller site 2 weeks ago and saw the bot visit within hours but it has not captured all of the pages yet and my updates on that site have stopped - it seems to be taking longer, I can't figure out why, but it is coming slowly but surely.

[claus]

>> DNS

There's a concept known as "TTL" (Time to live) on your DNS records. This specifies for how long they should be cached. It can be preset to anything from a day to a week (or even month), it's rather individual.

Check your values here: [dnsreport.com...]

RFC1912 2.2 recommends 1-5 days (86400 to 432000) unless you are about to change DNS entries

The numbers are seconds, the record is called "SOA MINIMUM TTL", and the key is the last part of the sentence above. Depending on your present value here, you would set it down to 60 seconds or even lower, then wait for as long as it's set to now (one week if it's currently set to a week) and then make the switch. This procedure makes sure that the shift will propagate faster.

Note - there's no reason to have it set to 60 seconds or lower for a whole week if you can avoid it by gradually decreasing the values (week-day-hour-zero-switch).

As for Googles DNS caching, it (the bot) seems to follow quickly now, but it still needs (a month) time to clear up the urls in the serps - this will be no problem to you as you only change IP.

/claus