Hosting is too important to stick with a provider that isn’t pulling their weight. However, as you have probably learned, changing hosting companies isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. No matter what your reason, you need to take certain steps before canceling your account.

Guide to Changing Web Hosting Companies

1. Begin by backing up your website. Accidents can happen when switching hosting companies and the last thing you want is for you to lose your essential data. Whatever web development tool you prefer will have a feature for this. Download all your files from your website to a local computer.
2. Then record any important information like email boxes, security settings, and configuration details. This stuff is easy to write down and you’ll be happy you did if something happens with your computer.
3. Let your visitors know of your future plans. Changing your hosting provider will affect them too, after all. This is especially true if you’re moving an eCommerce website. Although something like a blog or forum can definitely be very important, visitors may check your eCommerce site to see the status of their order. If they find news that the site is down while you’re switching servers, they may panic or even cancel their order as a precaution.
4. Give prior notification of when the switch will happen and email any customers who are waiting on orders. It will also help to highlight your contact information in case people have questions during the transition.
5. Now, it’s time to update your domain name by adding the name server information of your new hosting company. For anyone who has a hosting company that also functions as their domain name registrar, this is extremely easy. Otherwise, it’s going to take a bit more effort. In either case, you’re looking at about two days before the actual change takes full effect. DNS servers have to “get the message out” about your website’s new home across the entire World Wide Web.
6. Finally, you can cancel your old account. The reason you do this last, even after you’ve found a new hosting company is that you don’t want to cancel anything in case something goes wrong. You may have to return to that old server if something unexpected occurs.

Making the change

Changing hosting companies can be extremely stressful if you don’t know what you’re doing. Fortunately, as you can see, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Just follow the above instructions and you can switch providers whenever you want. If you’d like any further help, go ahead and give us a call!

ServerPronto offers the best affordable and secure hosting service in all dedicated server packages.

Source:

http://www.networksolutions.com/education/changing-web-hosts/