Serps and PR when moving server

[davidh6781]

I just want to ask, i am about to shift over to a new server which is a new ip, with a new hosting provider etc.

Other than the couple of hour change over with the dns stuff, is there any thing else that i should be aware of? I don't and can't afford to loose our serps or PR on our site. so our downtime has to be minimum.

Also may be in the wrong section but i paid for 12months upfront for the VPS server to which i want to out from the provider. (down more times than god knows what)

any help over the move would be good.

[jdMorgan]

Keep the site up on the old server if possible, so that visitors can still access it if their DNS service provider supplies a stale IP address lookup. This may not be possible for the parts of your site which use dynamically-generated pages, sessions, etc.; There is no guarantee in those cases that the visitors' DNS won't switch over 'half-way through' their session, and you likely don't want some people posting to 'the old copy' of your forum/blog, or trying to complete a shopping transaction on your old server.

Or you may want to simply serve a page from the old server which explains that the site may be unavailable to them until after the global DNS system updates -- Usually a matter of hours, but possibly several days for ISPs with old equipment or laggardly DNS update policy settings.

And by the way, set the TTL on your DNS record to a low value (e.g. ten minutes) before the switch-over, so that it will begin to update sooner. Be sure to change it back after you are satisfied that your DNS change has fully-propagated -- give it a week just to be sure.

If you're into advanced server configuration, you could proxy requests from the old server to the new using the IP address of the new server, not the domain; You cannot reliably proxy or redirect to the new server by using the domain name, since these functions also depend on correct DNS lookups.

If your traffic shows daily peaks and valleys, be sure to plan to start moving heading into one of the valleys, when traffic will be approaching a minimum.

If you do end up with two copies of your site on-line during the move, it's often helpful to have a very slight difference between the copies -- A different "Last updated" timestamp, an extra space, a or a synonym substitution on one of the pages, for example. This allows you to find out which server a page was served from, and can help with monitoring the change-over or with debugging any problems.

The major search engines are 'aware' that sites move, and you need not be worried about any 'penalties' due to your site being inaccessible for a few hours. But you do need to worry about 'getting it right' so that the only change they see is the domain-to-IP address change, and minor and expected things like the server type and/or version.

Jim