Have you ever been fed up with your current hosting provider? Do they keep going down or have poor customer service?
Sometimes moving to a new hosting company is the answer. The biggest thing is, how do you do it, especially with eCommerce sites, with minimal to no down time?
The key is someone skilled at moving sites and DNS preparation.
How do you know if someone is skilled at moving sites? Ask them how long it takes for your site to come up on the new server during the transition. If they tell you a day or two, or even three, then they do not know how to properly prepare DNS. The answer should be an hour or less if they know how to prepare everything in advance.
Steps to moving to a new hosting provider
- Create an account on the new hosting provider and copy your site to the new hosting provider
- Use a development subdomain for this so you can test it. For example: dev.yourdomain.com
- Once everything is set and working, start preparing DNS by turning the TTL (time to live) down on the DNS server settings. Put it as low as your DNS hosting will allow, however note what it is set to before you change it. We like to put it to 5 minutes.
- After the time has past for the old DNS TTL setting you can get started doing the actual live move!
- Start by copying the site again to the new hosting and re-test everything. This is your ‘dry run’ to make sure the copy will work seamlessly.
- Note any issues, fix and try the dry run again until there are no issues.
- If you have an eCommerce or dynamic store of any kind, close the store/put it in maintenance mode.
- Copy the site to the new hosting provider and test one last time.
- If everything works correctly, update your DNS to point to your new IP at your new hosting provider.
- Open up the eCommerce store on the new hosting provider and you should be good to go!
- If everything is good, you can later update the DNS to have a longer TTL if you’d like.
Summary
With this proper preparation, the only down time should be copying the site that one final time to the new hosting provider and then the minimal time for DNS to propagate! So it should be about 5-10 minutes depending on the speed of the copy of the site!
Keep in mind, sometimes bigger is not better when it comes to a hosting company. It really is the service that matters and level of support they provide. If you have an eCommerce store and aren’t happy with your service, contact us today to see if we would be a good fit for you!
