dns Archives | Matt Doyle | Elated Communications

In Move a Website to a New Server – The Easy Way, I looked at a simple way to move your website and email from one hosting company to another. This approach is fine for sites that don’t have too much user-generated content. However, if you run a busy site with lots of blog comments, forum posts, or customer orders then things can start to get messy with this approach.

Why? Well, when you move your domain to the new hosting company’s nameservers — a process known as redelegation — it usually takes a couple of days for the change to propagate around the internet. During this time, some visitors will be seeing your site on your old server, while others will be looking at your new server. This means that you’ll end up with new content being added to both the old site and the new site at the same time, which can be a major headache!

Fortunately, there’s a way round this problem. It’s a bit more fiddly than the “easy” approach, but it does result in a seamless transition. The great thing about this approach is that there will only be a few minutes where both the old and new servers are being accessed at the same time, as opposed to several days.

When you first start out with your website, you might decide to host it on someone else’s domain. For example, you might have a blog on blogspot.com or wordpress.com, or you might host your site on geocities.com, a low-cost Web hosting service provided by Yahoo!.

These hosting services are great if you only want to run your site as a hobby, and don’t care about attracting a lot of visitors or making money. However, if you really want your site to grow, it needs its own domain name. Here’s why:

It improves the image of your site. Hosting your site on a common domain name, such as blogspot.com or geocities.com, makes your site look — how to put it nicely? — low-budget. People are less likely to trust your site, and you’ll certainly have a hard time selling them anything. A site hosted on its own domain name looks more professional.
It makes your site more portable. If your site’s hosted on someone else’s domain, you can’t easily move to another hosting company. For example, if you want to move your site off geocities.com, you’re going to lose all the inbound links to your site. (It’s the same problem as having a 'myname@my-isp.com' email address; if you move ISPs, you lose your email address.) If you have your own domain, however, then you can move your site between different hosting companies while keeping the same domain name and URLs for the site.

In this article you’ll learn how to register and set up your own domain name.

Move a Website to a New Server – The Seamless Way

How to Set Up Your Own Domain Name

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