If you decide to change your hosting on the website, there should be an important reason for this. It could be the bad quality of technical support, unstable hosting, low server speed, changing business goals, etc.
Whatever the reason, you should not rush and make ill-considered decisions. Haste can only hurt the already not the best situation.
If you are not satisfied with the speed of your web resource or frequent failures, you should first find out from the technical support of the current hosting, what they are related to. And the results of the answers (or lack thereof) will make it clear whether to move the site to another hosting, or there are other solutions. If you still decide to transfer your website to another hosting, you need to understand what the process is, how to prepare for migration and what steps you need to take.
What to do before moving the site to another hosting
So the decision is made, you want to move from the current host. The first thing to do is choose the hosting where you will be moving. Most importantly, before you finally migrate to another hosting, make sure that the new hosting company meets all your requirements, you are satisfied with all service prices, contract terms, you chose the tariff and ordered it for a test period and you are satisfied with the quality of your site on the new service.
What not to do – start moving at the last minute, the day before the end of the current hosting service. Many unforeseen problems can arise during migration. As a result, your site may be down on the new server due to improper settings, may not have time to update the DNS zone after redirection, you may not have time to download all the data, especially if you have a large site or several. Ideally, you should have a stock of 7-10 days for a comfortable move and set up work in a new place.
Also, before starting a site migration, many users think about how long this procedure can take. The transfer time is affected by several important factors:
- readiness of the receiving server and load of the sending one;
- the width of the channel;
- quality of communication of access between servers;
- the number of files and the amount of data to be transferred.
When server availability is discussed and configured, you should pay attention to the size of the site and the data you want to transfer. You can find more information about the time of transferring the website to another hosting here.
Step-by-step instruction of transferring the site to another hosting:
- Place a hosting order in a new company. When you order hosting from us, you receive high-level technical support, which will help and adjust the transfer of the site at every step.
- Create a backup of your site on the old hosting, if possible. Or order it from technical support. It’s best to have a working archive of your site just in case. Make sure the copy contains all the files and database of the site.
- Ask in support of the new hosting if there is a free site migration service. If so, provide login information for the old hosting and wait for it to finish, staying in touch in case of additional questions. Make sure in advance that you provide the correct login and password and disable SMS authorization and other additional protection during the transfer. If two-factor authorization is not possible, it is better to provide technical support with a backup copy of the site in the form of a link to a file sharer or download the archive yourself to the hosting.
- If the selected hosting provider does not have a transfer service or if you want to transfer the site on your own, the next step is to transfer the site files to a new server. There are several ways to do this. The easiest way is to copy all the data to a computer and upload it to a new FTP server. You can read the step-by-step transfer instruction through MyAdmin here. You can find out in which folder you want to download the files from technical support or in the hosting knowledge base.
- Transfer the database of your site: download the dump from the old hosting, create the database and the user in the new hosting panel, import the resulting dump into it. Export and import operations will be convenient to do in phpMyAdmin, which is part of a set of tools in most hosting providers. Also, if necessary, replace the data to connect the database (host, user, password, database name) in the configuration file of your CMS.
- Check the correct operation of the resource at the temporary address. Depending on the features of your engine, the site may not work properly at a temporary address due to a link to your primary domain name. If you notice any errors – correct them yourself or with the help of technical support staff.
- Once you are sure that the site is running without errors on the new server, you can redirect the domain. Remember that changing NS records takes a long time, from 2 to 72 hours. Set the service mode to the version of the site that remains on the old hosting, so as not to lose important information, such as orders. We recommend changing the NS in the evening and at night, so that by morning all the information in the DNS is updated. Usually, 12 hours is enough for this.
- Close the account on the old hosting after the complete move. It is best to wait 2-3 days while the DNS zone is updated. Then make sure that you do not have the information you need from the old host and do not have automatic payments for services you do not need.
So you have completed this difficult task, changed the hosting company. We hope that the hosting you choose is better than the previous one and that its technical support helps with the transfer of sites, as we do. Order our hosting plans and we will transfer your site for free.