Changing Website IP Address

Any Tips or Warnings?

[stuart]

Hi all,
Can anyone offer any tips or warnings on changing a websites IP address without harming SE traffic?

TIA
stuart

[Nick_W]

Here ya go:

• Keep your site on the old server
  
• Do not close the old site till the SE's start crawling the new
  
• Be prepared for a 2mt wait
  
• Don't panic!
  

That's pretty much it...

Nick

[stuart]

Thanks for the quick response Nick_W, not wanting to push my luck but can i ask what about duplicate/mirror content?

I was going to use a similar domain name i got but some of the pages have been under the main domain for 3 years and I'm concerned about duplicate content and the PageRank of the main domain.

TIA

[dmorison]

If you're not in a position to run your website on the old IP address, then you need to make sure that the TTL (Time To Live) value for the host name who's IP address you will be changing is brought down to 0 (zero), with such notice that nobody can have the IP address cached at the point at which you make the change over.

If you're a very busy site and want to minimise the load on your authoritative DNS, you can use a binary chop.

Let's say your current TTL is 4 days. This means that a DNS server anywhere on the Internet can cache your IP address for up to that time. Then, if you're planning an IP change over, you must go in to your SOA record at least 4 days in advance and make the value 2 days. Then 1 day, then 12 hours, then 6 hours, etc. etc. as much as you can be bothered. When you get bored, go to 0 (zero). As long as you do this, then by the time of the change over every DNS lookup will be coming through to your authoritative server.

As soon as you've changed IP you can then return to the original TTL value.

If you're not fussed (or you don't like your DNS provider), you can just bring the TTL down to zero 4 days out. It will have the same effect, it's just that during that week a lot more traffic will be heading for your authoritative DNS.

Hope this helps.

[Nick_W]

>dupe content

The only way really is to watch those logs very carefully!

As soon as you see G hit the new IP turn off the old. I had no trouble when I did it but it pays to be safe right?

You could, if you can script, set up a program to notify you the minute G is seen...

Nick

[stuart]

Thanks very much Nick_W and dmorison for the excellent advice.

stuart

[HagenArnold]

Is it safe to assume that if you are visited by only one of the google deep-crawl bots that all the others know about your IP change? Currently I seem to get a visit daily from one or more of the deep crawl bots. A lot of times they don't stay but the mere fact that they find us seems to indicate that once that happens I can take down the old site. Does this seem correct?

cheers,
Hagen

[iThink]

I am planning to change webhosting provider and hence IPs (no change in domain name) in next 2-3 weeks. I was just wondering if the best time to do this will be right after the update (first monday after the weekend of the update) when googlebot is most likely to be silent or is there any other better time to do this?