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How to Avoid Downtime When Transferring Your Website to Another Web Host

April 11, 2009 · Filed Under Web Development 

This is a short tutorial on how to avoid downtime when transferring your website or blog to another web host. First off, why are you moving your site to another web hosting company? Dissatisfied with the service? Unreliable performance of servers? Or, do you just want to upgrade (say, from a shared web hosting service to a virtual private server or dedicated server)? Read more the following linked article to better understand Moving a Website to a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Whatever is/are your reason/s in transferring your website, here’s what we can say – there is a way to avoid downtime (or at least minimize it during migration). Note that it is much easier when you are moving your site from one web server to another under the same company. The tricky part is when you are migrating from one web hosting company to another.

Here is the outline of the steps you have to carry out in case you are transferring your website from Company A to Company B, whether you are simply transferring or have availed of a much better (and more expensive, if I may add) web hosting package:

1) Change the nameservers of your domain as prescribed by your NEW web host. You don’t have to wait for the “propagation period” of 24-48 hours (in most cases, 24 hours is the maximum time needed for propagation). Propagation of DNS means that your new domain’s IP address or nameservers have to be made known via propagation to the worldwide web so that people can access your site successfully. The changes in your nameservers will usually take some time, hence the “propagation period”. As per recommendation, this is the time when your site goes down for a day or two but hey, this is what this tutorial is all about, right?

2) After changing the required nameservers, your new web host will normally give you a temporary address (where you can access your new website), temporary FTP account and probably a temporary control panel. Make use of the FTP account given to you to transfer files you need to keep your website up and running. Do not delete your files or cancel your account with your OLD web host yet. Just keep all of them intact.

3) If you are moving a Wordpress-powered blog, backup your MySQL database using cPanel, H-sphere and other web control panels. Save the MySQL database backup file onto your local hard drive.

4) Setup the FTP program of your choice using the configuration settings given to you by your NEW web host. Assuming you have properly setup your FTP and can now upload files using it (e.g., the Free Filezilla FTP Client), upload the following files to the NEW web host: MySQL database backup, plugins, themes, uploads folder (that which usually contains photos and other media files), .htaccess (if available), robots.txt (if available) and sitemap.xml (if present). At this stage, it’s recommended that you DO NOT make any changes to your old site – don’t add posts, approve comments, change plugin settings, etcetera. Remember the exact locations of these files and folders because during the upload process, you should be able to put them in the proper directories or sub-directories.

This is only Part 1. TO BE Continued …

Update: Part 2 – How to Upload Files to A New Web Server When Transferring Site to Another Web Host

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Tags: How to, How to Transfer Your Website Without Downtime, Moving Site to a VPS, Website Development and Design

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