Looking for moving from one web host to another

When moving from house to house, you have to pack up all of your belongings in the old house before you can move, right? The same could be said when you are moving from web host to web host. The first and most important thing you can do is backup your web site and get it ready for the move. Remember to grab all of your static files. This would be all of your non-dynamic pages, images, templates and more. The exact files that you do backup might change depending on how your site is setup. If you’re using a content management system, then you might search the official site for that CMS to find the best way to backup the information it stores. Often you can also backup you databases (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Control panels can really come in handy when it comes to backing up too. All of the major control panels that your hosting account could come with should have a backup function built in. You should also always keep a backup of your web site in my opinion (make one at least one a month) no matter if your moving or not. That makes this job easier to manage and getting everything moved from the Web to your computer shouldn’t be such a big job. Next step you are going to want to take is to take all of those files, folders, databases and more from your computer to the new web host. Before transferring the information over, check with your new web host to see if you will be able to view your web site as it should be seen with the temporary URL they give you.

Once the files are uploaded with your new web host - go back to your older web host and disable your databases and put up a nice message saying, “Web site going through move, will be back soon.” or something to that effect. You need to turn off any dynamic content generation (like with forums or blogs/comments) so that your information moving from the old host to the new host will not be out of sync when you’re done. Now you need to get your domain name to point to your web site with your new web host. To do this, login to the place where your domain name is registered and updates your name servers. These should be supplied to you by your new web hosting company and are what tells the domain name to point to the new hosting account and away from the old one.