How to move a site to another hosting correctly

• Reasons for moving a site to another hosting 
• A sequence of actions when moving a site to a new hosting 
• Conclusions 

Reasons for moving a site to another hosting

Few of us from the first visit manage to find a decent hosting that will allow the project to function without interruptions and grow in development. It is usually due to a mistake during choosing a hosting provider by site owners, who find it difficult to immediately determine what qualities a hosting provider should have and what they generally need from hosting in a year, 2, and even more so 10 years. 

The main reasons for thinking about changing hosting include:

• frequent interruptions in work; 
• low uptime; 
• insecurity from hacker attacks;
• the constant growth of tariffs; 
• slack work of technical support and ignorance on the part of the service department. 

As you can see from all of the above, the site’s performance and the well-being of your business largely depend on the hosting provider and its work. Can I transfer my site to another hosting? It is necessary if you notice something amiss, and the service provider does not want to meet you halfway and ignores the comments, or if another company has made a better offer. Let’s take a look at transferring your site to another hosting without loss and take a closer look at the stages of this process.

The sequence of actions when moving a site to a new hosting

Transferring from one host to another is not the most challenging process but rather lengthy and requires a careful approach. In theory, even the most advanced specialist can cope with this task. It is essential to know what steps and sequence you need to perform and consider some essential points.

1. Choosing a service provider

If you have asked the question of switching to another hosting, you already understand this step’s importance. It depends on it whether a similar problem will arise again in the coming years after the move—we advise weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the various proposals. Read the rules for the provision of services by the hosting company, reviews, and, if possible, the recommendations of professionals. It is best to spend a couple of extra days studying information and comparing offers than then again changing the “registration.”

Further, moving the site to a new hosting moves from the stage of theory to technical practice.

2. Registration on the hosting provider’s website

On the website of the new hosting provider, you must fill out the registration form, noting all the information about the resource and its owner.

3. Adding a domain to a new hosting. 

This step is not required only if you plan to change hosting and the domain name of the site. In all other cases, you need to make changes to the existing domain settings by updating the data of DNS servers. Information about servers is stored in the section of the domain control center of the same name.

Next, we register the domain in the settings of the new hosting. Binding a domain name is the initial stage of creating an account; it will be completed within a few hours. This process will take no more than a day usually. 

4. Transferring site files

To protect yourself from the loss of important information, the recovery may take a lot of effort and time. In some cases, it will be impossible, be sure to create a backup copy (backup) of the entire file system of the site. 

To back up a site, it is better to use the hosting control panel’s built-in tools to create and restore backups. First, on the old server, zip all site files, then downloaded and transferred them to the new site’s root directory using the file manager. 

5. Database transfer

The most crucial step without which it is impossible to transfer a site from one hosting to another correctly. If an encoding error is made or you lose a part of the data, the information on the resource pages will be displayed with errors. 

As with file transfers, we recommend that you back up your database to your local computer in advance. In order to accelerate up the process, you can use an archiver, which is important if we talk about a large site with a rich history. 

The transfer process is performed using the “Export” and “Import” functions of the current and new hosting. First, we export the database to the computer, then go to the new hosting control panel, click on “Create database,” enter and save the data, then activate the “Import” function and load all the information.

6. Updating site engine configuration files.

The configuration data of your CMS requires updated information related to the change of hosting. To do this, you need to find the file that is the system documentation of the resource, open it with a text editor and enter the updated parameters. To complete this stage, save the file in the root folder of the resource on the new hosting.

7. Changing the NS record of the domain and “referral” to the new hosting

Up to this point, the data of the previous hosting appears in the NS settings. They need to be updated for the final transfer of the domain to the new hoster. To do this, look at the NS values ​​(server names), which are usually found in the letter confirming the registration with the new hosting provider, or request them from the technical support service. Finally, we recommend that you request a check of the working status of the site from your technical specialist. This will help to avoid a number of possible problems and errors before the final transfer of the site and to make timely adjustments that will solve the problem without the users noticing.

Conclusions 

Now you know how to transfer a site to another hosting and not lose data. In any case, it will not be superfluous to know what steps will be taken in order, if necessary, to be able to control the entire process and be sure of the correctness of the actions of specialists and understand what is the reason if something goes wrong. 

We recommend not to make any changes during the stages of moving the site to a new hosting because they will definitely not be reflected after the transfer is completed. Discuss the matter with a technician and agree on a date and time for the move in advance. Considering that this process can take up to several days, we advise you to take a responsible approach to choose the time to change the “place of residence” of the site, choosing the least active time in terms of user traffic to the resource. What was the decisive reason for you thinking about changing the hosting for your site? 

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