There can be any number of reasons why you want to change you web hosting company. You may have outgrown your old shared hosting plan, you might want to switch to dedicated web hosting, or you may hate your current cheap web hosting company so much that you want to burn down what is left of their third world datacenter. Whatever the reason, the first step in changing your hosting company is to admit that you have a problem. In other words, you have to be honest with yourself so you don’t make the same mistakes you did when you picked the first company. These are mistakes like picking the lowest priced web hosting company even though they didn’t have all of the features that you needed, making the mistake of thinking that when they said unlimited disk space and bandwidth that they really meant it and also thinking that 99.9% uptime was really possible. So, when you are through hanging out in the chat rooms and overusing the phrases ‘blood sucking vampires’ and ‘much to my horror and surprise’ it’s time to stop licking your wounds and change to a new web hosting company. For the purposes of what we want to cover here, we’re going to assume that you’ve learned your lesson about how to pick a hosting company that suits your needs, and focus on getting your website moved to a better low cost web hosting company.
All sarcasm aside, the first step to changing web hosting companies is to find out who owns your domain name. That’s because if you got a free domain name with your hosting plan, your web hosting company probably owns it and you have to buy it from them. If you purchased your domain name separately from your web hosting package and you are the administrative contact, then you can skip this step. To find out who owns your domain name, you have to go to the InterNIC WHOIS database. This is the database that has the registrant, the contacts, the expiration date, and the name servers of all .com domain names. (Besides looking up your own information, this is how the authorities track down internet criminals.) Under contacts, whoever is listed as the administrative contact is the entity who legally owns the domain name. In order to do anything with the domain name, you must have the user name and password. If you purchased the domain name separately from a registrar, then you should have gotten it from them when you made the original purchase. If your web hosting company is the administrative contact, you will have to buy the user name and password from them.
That’s right. If you got a free domain name from a web hosting company along with a hosting package and you want to change companies, you will have buy the name. So, you have the option of scrapping everything if you aren’t that heavily invested, or you can call your hosting company and buy your domain name. There are two parts to buying your domain name from your cheap web hosting company. The first is fulfilling your contract. In some cases, this means paying for the entire year. This is because the domain name was only free because you signed a year-long contract. Some companies will say that since you already used the name for free you have to pay for the entire year to cover for the free time that you used it. Not every company does this, but you don’t be surprised if yours does. After you settle the contract, you can buy the name from the hosting company to take it with you. What your company will charge you is up to them. This may sound harsh, but if you read the fine print, the hosting company is within their rights. This is why it is always better to buy your domain name separately from your affordable web hosting package.
Now that you have your domain name and have picked out a new hosting company, it’s time to make the switch. Assuming that you have signed the contract and paid for the services of the new company, they will start sending you email with all of the information that you need to get started. When you sign up, they will also ask you if you already have a domain name. If you tell them yes, some companies will charge you to bring your own domain name and some won’t. At any rate, in the emails from the new company, you will find the username and password of your new account at the new web hosting company. You will also find the FTP hostname, server IP address and all of the other information that you need for your account. The easiest thing to do is print this information out so you have it for easy reference when you are setting up your new account.
The next step is to associate your old domain name to your new hosting package so that you can start building and using your new site. You’ll need the name server, which will have come in one of the emails you received from your new hosting company. Sometime this is called the Domain Name Server or DNS, and there are two of them – the primary name server and the secondary name server. They will either look like domain names themselves or they may be numbers. Either way, you have to go back to your old account and go to the option ‘change name severs’. This is where you enter the name servers of your new account. You will get some warning signs, but these are just cursory. Don’t worry, it’s not a last attempt from your old hosting company to keep you hostage.
Once you have completed this transaction, it will take a few days for it to take effect. This is because this information has to be changed on servers all over the world that hold domain name information. In the mean time, you may be given a temporary URL, but this isn’t anything to get too concerned about. In two to three days, your website should be visible with a homepage. When your website is able to be seen, refer to your new FTP information and try connecting to the server. If this works, you are ready to start moving your site.
Here’s where the logistics of moving from one place to another are about the same as any other kind of move, because no matter how you look at it, you are still in two places at once. Before you do anything else, you have to go to your old website and back everything up, and you want back up everything into two files. One will be for archival purposes and the other will be to work with while you are transferring everything to the new site. This is something you will have to take step by step because there are a lot of files that won’t transfer correctly to your new hosting package. One thing you will especially have to look out for is the control panel. If you are moving from cPanel to cPanel, you should be all right, but if you are moving a customized control panel on either end, you are going to have some configuration problems. You’ll just have to make handwritten notes and work it out.
You will also need to let your customers know that you are moving. You can do this with your custom error pages. Also, try to get a temporary email address where people can leave you messages. You may lose some emails during the move, and if you have an ecommerce site this is never a good thing. You’ll want to keep your old account for a few weeks to make sure that you continue to get all of your emails and to keep everyone posted as to the fact that you have changed web hosting companies.
Once you’ve backed up and given everyone a forwarding address, you can start downloading your files from your old site and upload them to your new site using FTP. If you aren’t sure how to do this, there are a lot of tutorials on the Internet that will go over it step by step with you and tell you what kind of problems to you are likely to encounter. Most of the problems will be from software incompatibility. This will because if you are changing from a hosting company that you didn’t like, chances are it’s partially because you are looking for new software and software updates. You also may be changing form Linux to Windows hosting, which is never always easy either.
At any rate, once you have uploaded all of your files into your new account, it’s time to go through and see what works and what doesn’t. This will include looking at links, email accounts, data bases, scripts, and everything else that took so much work to set up the first time. If you used a free site builder to build your site, that may be a lost cause, although if you switch to FrontPage hosting, it’s pretty forgiving about importing almost anything. This may be a time-consuming and tedious process, but it is just something that you have to do whenever you make a move from one place to another. When you are finished, though, you can go back to your old hosting company, close your account and bid a fond farewell. Or, you can always go blog about how much you hate them for a while to blow off some steam and make yourself feel better.
