What You Should Know If You Want To Change Your Web Hosting Provider

If your website becomes popular and your current host does not meet your needs for more bandwidth, storage, etc., switching from one host to another may be necessary. This is especially true if your website is hosted on a free hosting company.

If a move become necessary, be sure to plan it carefully. The first step is to decide on a new hosting company, of course.

Once you have found a host that can meet all your needs, you need to move your site on to the new server. Before making any moves, be sure to back up your website from the old host.

If your website isn't well structured and has been growing haphazardly, this is a good time to consider redesigning things. That could simply mean a new page design or it could mean redesigning your database and content storage.

For the first 48 hours after moving to a new host, you should use a redirect page on your old site, that automatically forwards people to the new one. This will ensure that your visitors will see the new site, even if its IP address hasn't propagated yet.

A new website takes approximately 48 hours to be listed on domain servers throughout the Internet, but everything should be just fine after that. A few more suggestions to ease the transition include:

1. Find out whether your new host is running on Unix or Windows and make sure it will be compatible with everything you're moving from the old host.

2. Check to see how much storage you need for all your files and content on your current site, and make sure you get enough on the new host to give you room to grow.

3. Find out which services your new host offers, and make sure that all the features you have been using on your current host are available. Some examples include autoresponders and email forwarding.

4. Make sure that your new host supports Frontpage extensions if your website was built using Microsoft Frontpage.

5. Check your new web host's policy about extra bandwidth. You may need to know this if your website continues to get busier.

6. If the new host uses a shared server, make sure there won't be any adult sites hosted on the same server. These can get busy and slow all the server's other sites down.

7. Check some review sites and forums so that you can read some customer feedback about your new host before you sign up. This will give you a good indication of the type of service you can expect.

Once you have your data uploaded to your new host, test your site to make sure it's working properly. You should be able to preview your site before you fully switch your domain name to the new address.

Founder and actual CEO, Ricardo d'Argence has been in the field for almost 20 years. Alojate.com is now one of the best web hosting providers in Mexico, offering a range of solutions for all business needs. Dedicated servers, Search Engine Optimization, factura electronica, web hosting & registro de dominios.