moving website from one host to another Archives - Matt Doyle

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.

If you run a website for any length of time, chances are you’ll want to move your site and email to a new web server at least once. For example:

You may have exceeded the bandwidth allowance or disk quota of your current server (good for you, your site’s getting more popular!)
You might be fed up with your current host’s downtime or poor technical support
Your old hosting company may be going out of business (an all-too-common occurrence unfortunately)

Let’s assume you’ve chosen a new Web hosting company and you’re ready to transfer your website. Broadly speaking, there are 2 ways that you can move your site across:

The easy way. This is the approach I’ll cover in this article. Essentially this avoids messing about with DNS and nameservers too much, and is more suited to sites without too much user-generated content (forums, blog comments, user registrations, ecommerce, and so on).
The seamless way. This is more complex and involves working with DNS to ensure a quick, smooth changeover. It’s better suited to busy sites with lots of user-generated content. I cover this approach in Move a Website to a New Server – The Seamless Way.

In this step-by-step article I’ll try to give a general overview of the moving process, and look at some of the pitfalls to avoid along the way. I strongly recommend reading this whole article before you start the moving process.

moving website from one host to another

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