Changing Your Host Without Worry

When you do business online long enough, you might want (need) to change your host. Here is a smooth way to do it.

Moving Site
Many hosting companies move your site for you as part of their service, but you won't have time to check if your site functions well at the new host. You want to at least make sure the order process works fine at the new place, don't you? To do so, just follow these simple steps. First, upload all of your files to the new host. Then, visit the new site by using the IP address and fix all glitches. Once you are confident with your site at the new host, change the DNS hostname with the new one at your domain name registrar. Until changing DSN information, no one comes to your new location, so you have plenty of time to test your site.

Search Engines
Maybe, most of you are wondering, changing hosts would affect search engine rankings of your site. Fortunately, if you don't make any significant changes to the content of your site, changing hosts won't affect search engine rankings, and all of the search engine robots will find your new location. The worst scenario would be if your site isn't accessible when search engine robots come to your site. In that case, your listing may temporarily be dropped. Your site will be listed again if your site is reachable at the robots' next visit, but it can be 4 weeks later. Try to minimize down time as much as you can. Following the above steps would be fine.

Don't Leave E-mail Behind
As long as your old site is up, there will be visitors to the old place and e-mail messages sent to your old mail boxes. This happens because it takes days for all the DNSs on earth to know you moved to a new host. You don't need to wait for residual traffics and e-mail to stop before closing your old site. DNSs are smart enough to find your new location. However, you should check old mail boxes until the old host completely closes your account. You know how important it is to answer all the e-mail in order to run a business online, don't you?