Many company and individuals wish to change to a new web hosting service provider from the old web hosting service provider. The reason for this migration could be a poor service level, sufficient storage space or bandwidth or many more. Changing a new web hosting service provider can either be quite a cumbersome task and hence here are some few things which you should keep in mind.
- Continue your web hosting account with the existing service provider: It is highly recommended to keep your service in continuation with your existing service provider and continue rendering their services. It is essential that in the transition step- i.e., new account set up, file transfer, email creation, email settings, DNS modification, and propagation to retain the services. Hence it will ensure that your website and email accounts will be running without any interruption during the migration to new web hosting service provider.
- Selecting a new web hosting service provider: There are several considerations while selecting the new web hosting service provider
- Type of operating system: Windows or Linux is the OS where your technologies of the website or application could be dependent. For Ex: If you have ASP, MySQL, and other Microsoft technologies, you will need a Windows platform hosting package.
- Bandwidth and Disk Space
- Add-ons – Backup, security, network settings, monitoring and many more.
- Uptime and SLA.
- Backup of the existing data and files: The next step in the migration is to all the important files, data, rich media, repositories and directories. This serves as the backup of all the data and files, in case you missed them during your migration tasks. It is a fairly easy task which can be accomplished by FTP. However, some Free web hosting service provider does not offer FTP services. In this case, you won’t be able to download the existing web files and thus has to create new files. For this, you need to check with your web hosting service provider who offers free website creator services and ensure that the new web hosting service provider offers the FTP services.
- Set up new (Same) email service: To ensure that while migrating to your new web hosting services all your emails accounts should send and receive the emails properly including email aliases and forwarders.
- DNS Changes: While uploading the web files in the new web server, you have to re-create your email accounts. This can be done by moving forward by making the necessary domain name server changes. It can be obtained once you have signed up with the new hosting provider. The DNS changes can be done by your domain management panel or your domain registrar. Also, keep note that it takes 28-48 hours for the DNS propagation.
- Cancel Old Account with Old Web Hosting Service Provider: Once your new web hosting account has been created and activate and all your website and applications including emails have been working properly, then you can proceed with the old account cancellation.
