Hi, I am planning to change a hosting provider of one of my established website. This website is more than a year old and almost all the urls are crawled by SE. I contacted my hosting company and they told me that I need not do anything special to move my website from one host to another. They confirmed that I just need to download the data from FTP and upload to the new hosting space that I purchased with another host. I already have migrated my domain name to this new host.
I have a doubt here. All the URLs of my site are more than a year old and are established in SE rankings. If I move my site (pages) to another host will the URLs break?
I am not sure what DNS setting means and does it have any role to play here?
Site will be down in this process for few days and then will all the urls be reestablished and will not return 404 error?
Is it really a matter of uploading the same data to new hosting space or do I need to take some more additional steps?
Kindly advice if you have faced similar situation.
If you’re on cPanel platform currently, there’s no need to download files and then upload, simply create Full-Website Backup and transfer to the new server, then restore. This works if you’ve root access at new server, otherwise ask your hosting provider to do that for you (as this method is hassle-free and must be done free of charge).
When you’re done with moving, you can change nameservers at your domain registrar to point to the new hosting server and usually there should not be any downtime.
404 must not appear if moving was done correctly and site is working fine on both old and new servers.
Changing a server for your site must not affect your SEO ranking, but please make sure the new server is fast enough, as crawlers do not like slow performance websites.
Finally, make sure you’re satisfied with your new hosting provider and cancel current contract.
[font=verdana]As long as the URLs remain the same, that’s the most important thing, and if you take a copy of the entire site by FTP and zap it all straight up to the new host then your URL structure won’t change. Search engines don’t care about your hosting arrangements or who your site is hosted with, as long as they can continue to access it at the URLs they are expecting.
If the search robots hit 404 errors then they will periodically keep trying – the site is likely to temporarily lose its position in the rankings, and the longer it is down, the further it will drop and the longer it will take to get those rankings back. You can minimise this risk by not cancelling your old hosting for a few days until the new site is established. Once you’ve changed the DNS settings, it can take about 3 days for those new settings to be recognised by servers around the world, and in the meantime they will continue to try the previous host, so if your site can remain accessible there then you won’t get so much downtime.[/font]
Dont be afraid of this proces. Just start it ontime, so you are not pushed on last days of your old hosting.
Prepare everything and have in mind what you need to do.
backup your files (these are not changed often) -> extract files on new hosting
backup mysql and from that time you can add maintenance message to your site so users cant add new content to mysql. Or just rename files which has to do with insertion into mysql. You may also only add message to your old site warning users not to add any data for next 24 hours or untill this message disappear.
upload mysql to new hosting
check whether site ploading ok, via temporary url (IP address)
change your domain nameservers in your domain registar
From now on people who visit your site first time most probbly will see site from new server immediatelly. Regular visitors and you will see site with 24-48 hours delay.
To see new website immediatelly, load your site via so called “web proxy”.
THis is how i move my sites…