Learning how to transfer your website to a new server or web host is actually a lot easier than you might think. If you have found a new web host that is more reliable or more cost effective, you might be worried about the transfer process. However, it really is not that difficult of a process and should not deter you from making a better decision regarding your web hosting company. There are many reasons to consider switching to a new web host provider including quality of service, price, slow service, technical support and more. Now that you have made the decision to switch web hosting companies, there are a few steps you need to take in order to get started.
How to Transfer Your Website to a New Server or Web Host:
First, make a complete copy of your website. At this point, do not cancel your previous service provider yet until you have completely set up a new web hosting account with your new web host provider. To make a copy of your website, you are going to want to use an FTP utility to download all of the files from your website to your computer from your web host. This is important to do even if you think you still have all of the files on your computer already. This is a great way to do a complete and comprehensive back up of your website. Once you have backed up your site, it is a good idea to choose your new web host provider if you haven’t done so already. Once you have done this, you are going to need to contact the domain name registrar where you first registered your domain name. You will want to change the Domain Name Server (DNS) to your new hosts DNS information.
It is important to be prepared for your site to be down while the DNS record is being changed and switch through the world’s SHOIS servers. Usually this part of the process takes about 24 to 72 hours to be completed. Because of the downtime of your website, it will be important to stay on top of any existing services you have on your old domain name like email forwarding, web pointing and website hosting until the transfer is complete to ensure continued service for your customers.
Once your domain name has been transferred you can go ahead and upload all of those files you saved to your computer in the beginning to your new web host. Many web hosting providers will offer helpful tools and tricks you can use to complete this process. They also will have great customer support during this time to help get you started if you have any questions about how to do this part to get your website up and running again. There are tools you can use from both Dreamweaver and FrontPage programs to help you transfer these HTML pages to keep the majority of your website intact for the transfer. This is an important part of learning how to transfer your website to a new server or web host.
If you aren’t using Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you might want to go about transferring these files the manual way. You can do this by copying the source code by right clicking on the page when you visit the site and select “view/source.” Then it will show up on Notepad. You can then click save as to save it all to a place as an HTML file. Make sure when you are saving to do so by changing the drop down menu l to “all files” instead of “txt”. Now you have a complete page that is ready to load whenever you want. However, when dealing with images, it is important to note that you will have to do these separately.
Checking Your New Website:
If your new web page does not look the same as it did on your previous website, you probably didn’t have the HTML code and/or files transfer completely. This is not too big of an issue usually, and you can just make the necessary design changes to reflect back on how your site used to look. This is also a good time for you to consider making any changes you might want to add to the website. Now you will need to test your website now that your domain name and the website have been transferred. You should test your services using your new control panel and by checking to see if your website is now accessible on the Internet and if all of the links, etc. work. If everything works as it should, you can simply cancel your account with your previous web host provider to get started doing business exclusively with your new site and web host provider.
