How to Switch Your Website to a New Web Hosting Company

Perhaps your business is growing faster than your web hosting company can keep up with or maybe your chosen site just isn’t up to par with your sites’ needs. In any case, the best solution to this conundrum is to switch web hosting companies. Before you dive blindly into what can be a sea of confusion, there are a few steps you should take to ensure the transition from one site provider to another is seamless and worry-free.

Switching to a new web hosting company will go smoother if you create and follow a detailed plan, just like with other sorts of renovation undertakings. In order to ensure a smooth and efficient transfer from one web hosting company to another make sure you give yourself plenty of time to understand, complete and then test each step of the process.

From the time your new site is up and running to the initial planning stage, requires 3 to 4 weeks. After you’ve thoroughly researched and identified your potential business-partner site, your new site can be up and running within 24-48 hours.

The first, and most important, step at this stage is to ensure you do a secure and complete backup of all the files on your current web hosting provider’s site regardless of whether or not you have the files stored on a local computer. Backups are like insurance, you never appreciate having them until a catastrophe strikes. So, even though it may be tempting to eliminate this step, you may live to regret it.

You should always back up all important files. These files include HTML files, script, and database and server log files. To increase transition efficiency and simplify file downloads, create a directory structure that mirrors your web server’s.

Once you receive confirmation from your new web hosting company that your account has been activated, you can upload your files to the new server.

Since you have already saved your files in a familiar directory structure, uploading your information to the new site should progress without a hitch.

Following completion of the above steps, you can now run some tests on the new web site in order to verify that all modules are working perfectly.

Once everything is working flawlessly, you are ready to change your old Domain Name Server (DNS) to the new one which would have been provided by the new web hosting company. All that’s left now is for you to sit back and wait for the hits to begin.