7 Points To Remember When Changing Web Hosts

Changing web hosts becomes important when your site becomes more popular, and your current host is not able to meet your requests. That is when you will need to find a host that will be able to offer you a higher level of scalability and more efficient services.

Your change should however be carefully planned. Obviously, the first step you should take is to find the proper new host. The second will be to make the switch. However, before you make the actual change you must make a back up of all your data. The back up will have to be saved in the original directories, so that you do not have to do fresh database planning.

Nevertheless, if your website doesn’t have a good structure, then this is a good time to redesign the database professionally. You’ll find that good database management brings in scalability.

For the first two days, you will have to use a redirection page on your old host to make sure that you don’t loose any traffic. Afterwards, the new IP address will be listed on many domain name servers on the internet, and your visitors won’t face any hardship when trying to reach your site.

Below are a few more tips that will make the transition seem easier:

1. Find out beforehand if your new hosting service uses a Windows or a UNIX operating system to make sure that it is compatible with your current hosting package.

2. Ensure that your new host can provide you with sufficient storage space – and can add more GBs when you need them.

3. Find out if your new host can provide you with facilities such as auto responders, e-mail accounts and mail forwards. These are small services but they can help to make your site more professional.

4. Does your old host use FrontPage? If your new host uses FrontPage, is it a similar version?

5. Make sure that your new host can release extra bandwidth as and when the visitors come to your site.

6. If the event of shared hosting, try to make sure that your new host doesn’t host adult sites. These sites tend to corner large amounts of bandwidth. As a result, this will slow your site down.

7. You should also try to check the past experience of your new host. Don’t go to any new company. Try to choose an older, more experienced firm.

Once you upload your files onto the new server, try to ensure that the new website functions the right way. Most hosts provide a preview link, that will help you to see how your website looks, before the domain name is even transferred.


Michael Beattie is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.

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