moving hosts and issues involved

moving webhosts in smooth way

[rankin_gav]

Hi,

I've been with my webhost for almost 4 years and though I'm happy with the service, but I've found another company which offers what I believe to be better bandwidth and storage, I run little site with them already so I know how good they are. I use asp on windows server 2000, mysql database and my company is currently hosted in Canada and I want to move to a company in the UK.

I'm almost scared to move the site for a number of reasons.

Downtime, maybe lost rankings from search engines if they find the domain not available, getting it working on the new platform etc, I can see a lot of headaches.

I wondered is there an easy way to transfer or tips and hints to make sure it goes according to plan

Thanks

Gavin

[GregMR]

Your new host should be able to provide a temporary URL to use while setting up your new site. This will let you setup the site and test it before going live. Once it's all setup and tested, and you're comfortable it's working as expected, then change your DNS information and have your domain name pointed to the new server. Let both sites run (old server and new server) for a few days to a week and watch your traffic on the old site. When traffic stops, or nearly stops, you can "turn off" the old server. This way you should not have any "downtime". Often times you may still take a hit with the SEs when they discover you moved but this should only be temporary.

[Corey Bryant]

Set up your email on your new email servers.

Set up the database. When you are almost ready to move it - change the connection string to the new database.

Copy all the files over to the new server (and make sure the database string is to the new one).

Now change the name servers. This way, everyone who goes to www.example.com will might be going to the old or new site, but they all will be using the same database. The old site might be a bit slow but things will be fine in the next few days

-Corey

[steve]

I've just moved from a US to UK host.

Traffic and SERP's didn't suffer at all.

I followed the process outlined by Gregg and Corey.

Googlebot found the new site within 24 hours, it started to show up in the UK SERP's in about 5 days.