moving hosts..

would it be safe now?

[daamsie]

I know this question gets asked regularly, but considering things are a little unique at the moment in the google indexing cycle, I figure it's worth seeing what people think.

I need to move hosts (to make sure I'm not down when google crawls next!) and am wondering how safe it is at the moment? I have seen no-one report the deep-crawler yet, so I am assuming it is safe until then.

Also, any tips on ways of going about this?. My plan is as follows.

1. make sure the site is all set on the new server, with table structures, etc.. all in place.
2. transfer dns
3. put up holding screen on both servers.
4. transfer data to the new server.
5. remove holding screen from new server.

The old data and pages will be left on the old server for a few months while Google figures out all IP issues. Does this plan sound like a good one?

Thanks for any advice or tips from experience.

[percentages]

daamsie,

I have moved over 100 sites to my preferred hosting company over the last 3 months.

I followed a plan similar to yours, in particular you leave both the old and new hosts in place for a couple of months....nothing bad has happened.

I see no reason why your transition will not be successful on this or the next update. Let the puppy rip and enjoy the new host!

[petertdavis]

It's best to have your account up and ready on the new host prior to changing your nameservers. You probably don't want Google to index your holding screen.

[Tartan75]

be aware that googles dns cache can be slow to update. 2 weeks after the change, I still find (this is current) google is taking the caches of my site from the old server (I have left a full copy of the site on the old server). You dont want google to get the holding page on the old server while the new server is the live which visitors see. Personally I think this is an issue google could improve on fairly easily - i dont see why google should have their bots looking at a differant site to the one visitors see.

[olias]

Although the dns cache does tend to be slow to update, it has been much quicker this year.

With one of my more recent moves, after a week it hadn't changed so I completely killed the old account and within a day the new site had been found - the theory being that if Googlebot gets a dns error it may try a lookup and find the site has moved.

That is a fairly drastic move though, so I don't necessarily recommend it but may be worth switching off old site if you have no joy after a couple of weeks I reckon.

[daamsie]

Thanks for the advice.. I figure I need to have a holding screen on both servers at least for a brief time while all the database data is being transferred. I am assuming there won't be any deepcrawling activity soon though, so hopefully it would be safe for a couple of hours.

I figure the holding screen will need to stay up on the old server until I'm confident all DNS has moved across. After all, I don't want people adding data to that one anymore! I guess I'll take that down as soon as it's done though, so it still looks like a regular site to Google.

[taskmaster]

I mooved host tree times last month with a week between the moving and Im still on Google.

zeus