Are you getting downtime pretty often for your website? Is the tech support team of your hosting provider just not responding to your questions? Are you often intrigued by the promotions that your current hosting provider does while asking you to upgrade the system for a better security (After all, they promise security when you buy the package initially)? Well, these are signals to get rid of your current host and move to a new one.
Although a pretty straightforward process, the whole idea of backing up database, application and scripts horrifies webmasters. However, you don’t need to be afraid of all the technicalities; you really don’t need to be a techno freak to move to your new host. Follow the simple steps mentioned below and enjoy a hassle free switch to the new hosting provider:
Set up your new hosting account
First of all, sign up for your new hosting account. Most of the reputed hosting providers take 24 hours to activate your account. But, the general activation time may well be less than 24 hours and once things are completed, you will be sent an automated email stating your username and password. This should also include instructions stating how you can transfer your website files into the new hosting account. If the hosting provider takes more than 24 hours to activate the account, you should not think twice and register with the hosting provider that you have next in your list (You must have shortlisted the best options for your website already, right)?
In case you are not sure, there are plenty of reputed hosting providers such as Midphase or ANhosting. Don’t worry about the price, there are plenty of discount coupons available in the market and by availing any of those, you can easily save a lot of bucks.
Once activated, the hosting provider most probably will come up with a static IP address or may be a temporary hostname, make sure to keep a note of that.
Back up your website files and database
- Create one temporary hard-drive in your local system.
- Using FTP (Most used and convenient as well), copy the entire website files into this new directory.
- You should use correct mode while downloading website files, for images, use BINARY mode and for PHP/Perl/HTML/ASP, use ASCII mode.
- Now, coming to the backup database part! If you are using Access database, just download the latest copy into your local machine hard drive. The situation is a bit different with MySQL or PostGreSQL databases as in these cases; you need to dump of the tables.
Uploading to the new host
Just replicate everything that you have in your local system hard drive once the new hosting account is activated. Remember one thing; the CGI/Perl scripts should not be directly uploaded. You should first check out with your hosting provider to understand the exact path to Perl and then adjust the same. In case of MySQL databases, the tables are needed to be re-inserted into the new hosting account.
Checking the website after moving is complete
- Open your internet browser.
- Try out your website with the new IP address that your new hosting address must have provided to you. For example, if your IP address is 64.68.53.21, you should check whether this address: http://64.68.53.21 opens up fine or not.
- If you click on some of the pages of your site, this may lead you to the old site. You don’t need to panic if this happens. This is known as absolute linking and with this format, one page links to other pages like “http://www.yourdomain.com/someotherpage.html”. In case of relative linking, it would have been linked like “someotherpage.html” and you would have not faced this problem. No need to be worried though. Once you transfer the domain to the new hosting account, things should start working smoothly.
- Final thing to do is to check out whether the scripts and other rather complex functionalities of your website are doing good or not.
So, with the entire moving to a new host procedure explained above, what you need now is a Midphase coupon code or an ANhosting coupon code. These will help you in saving up some bucks that you may put to some use for the betterment of your website. Just remember one thing, during the entire moving procedure, if you face any problem, the hosting provider customer representative should be available for your help.
Guest article written by: Christofer loves to write about internet marketing related stuffs. He also helps people to choose the best possible domain name for their websites. Off late, he has started to solve any hosting related issues that a webmaster may face. If you have any questions or want to share your experience, please use the comment feature.
Professional web design have an experience, moving to another web host task can be done easily. Any professional developer with more than 2 years of experience makes it very easier to solve any kind of website issues.
Also if you have other add on domains, remember to add them to the new host. And change their name servers. Keep in mind that it could take some time for these changes to take effect. If you are not very familiar with these things just give all the work to your new host. They will be more than happy to do it, since they are taking a new customer.
The Cpanel provides some useful tools for entire site backup so moving to a new host is not such a daunting task anymore.
Moving hosts is never easy… I’ve had a horrendous time in the past moving my hosts as there are always unexpected problems.. All I can say is that pick a reputable host and stick to them. It’s quite easy to get carried away with attractive offers but sooner or later realize the folly in that!
nice post !! its never easy to do… found it to be a little easy with the help of your post !! nice share… 🙂
By providing detailed information regarding how to move on the new hosting is really very informative especially for the beginner of the IT field. It will help them to understand very clearly from old hosting to new hosting.