Terrific Tips To Try When Changing Web Hosts

Terrific Tips to Try when Changing Web Hosts

If you are in the position that you wish to move your website, and have never done so before, you need to keep in mind that this is by no means a simple task. This is not just a simple transfer of files from one place to another and you are done. Moving a web site is anything but a trivial matter, you must pay attention to what you are doing otherwise you will surely run into problems. It is not an uncommon thing for people to forget very important aspects about their site when moving; this may lead to trouble when people are actually trying to view the site. This can be a major problem with traffic, and lets face it without traffic you do not have much in the way of a successful web site. The key to a good move is to ensure that you do not loose too many visitors to the site in the process. Another very much overlooked aspect to moving your site, is whether or not you even have your own domain name.

One of the easiest things to do when moving your website is the transfer of the files from the one server to another. One of the biggest mistakes that someone can have is to keep only one copy of their site. This means that the only copy is the one that the server is actually running. It is always best to copy the site and store it on your computer, better still make a couple of copies one for the computer and one saved on disc. This will make you rest easy at night knowing that you will never loose the site or have this get corrupted and not be able to repair it. It is definitely a good idea to do this prior to telling your prior web host that you plan on stopping the service with them. The unfortunate part about one of these moves is that not unlike any other business venture telling a supplier that you are going elsewhere never really goes down well. They may in turn slow down your bandwidth, or even cancel your account before you are even ready to have it done. This is very silly and can be quite petty however; it is still a fact, as companies never like to lose business or money.

It is always a good idea to copy your files for transfer, the exact same way that you initially saved them. This means that if you saved them in FTP from the beginning, then they should be save in FTP when you are preparing to transfer them too. If for whatever reason you are using a free server that may or may not include banners and pop ups on your site it is best not to just save the whole thing. You will be saving all the JavaScript files as well, only to have to go back and remove them later. Why even put yourself through the trouble, and add more work for yourself? You will need to make sure that there are no internal links that are still attached to the old address, such as URL's that are hard coded. If you have your own domain this will not be a problem, as the URLs will not change anyways. The best way to do it is to make all your links that are internal, relative links. This will make the whole process of transfer easier in the long run, and save you many hours of troubles down the road. Some people still like to do things the hard way, but hard coding all of their links again at a later date. Either way this method is not really a good idea.

If for what ever reason your web host that you are changing from required or even forced you to add banners of some sort, or wanted you to add text links, prior to changing over and moving the site you will want to be sure that you erase and delete them. You can upload all your pages to the new web host, test all the pages and then cancel out of you old web host account. This will keep things from getting messed up in the process, and it will also prevent any poor moves on the part of the perhaps angry and malicious prior web-hosting server.