It can be a bit daunting when you have to migrate from one web hosting provider to another, but before you take the leap of shifting your website to CWCS take a moment to check through these important steps, which can help ensure minimal downtime for your sites:
- Ensure that the new CWCS account meets all your needs, such as storage space, bandwidth, support for the operating system and applications that run on your current web site, support for scripts, and an adequate number of email accounts and auto responders.
- Back up all of your website content and databases on your current server. Make sure you download all emails to your local machine as it may not be possible to restore mails from another server.
- Upload all your files and databases to the new server and make sure you retain all the file permissions as they were on your old site (to avoid scripting errors).
- DNS updates take up to 24-48 hours to propagate globally across the Internet. Let your customers and website visitors know about this planned upgrade. Make the move when your traffic is at its lowest (ideally during weekends or holidays).
- If domain name registration is a part of your old hosting plan, then you might want to enquire about transferring your domains to CWCS. If your domain name was registered using a third party company, then this is not an issue.
- If your site is dynamic, DNS update delays can cause data loss. Some customers may see your old site while others have access to the new one. To minimize such occurrences, disable your sites on the old webhost with a message on a static page so that these users cannot update the old DB on the server.
- Make sure all the visitors to your old webhost are being redirected to your new site before cancelling your current web hosting provider. It is best to keep both sites up and running in parallel for at least one week, it will help you to retrieve data if there are any issues. Take a final backup of all your site content and database before cancelling your current web hosting provider.
- Check your site on Google to ensure that the indexed links are still working well. Sometimes, the links spidered by Googlebots on your previous webhost show a ’404 page not found’ error, which might impact your SEO plans.