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

Changing from one web host to another can become necessary if your website becomes popular and your current host can’t meet your needs for bandwidth, storage, etc. This can be especially true if your site is hosted on a free web host.

If you need to move your site, plan the move carefully. Of course, the first thing you must do is choose your new hosting company.

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.

Use a redirect page on your old site for the first 48 hours after you move it to a new host. This automatically forwards people to your new site and makes sure that your visitors are able to see your site even if its IP address hasn’t yet propagated.

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 all the files and content for your current site need. Make sure your new host gives you enough room to let your website grow.

3. Check to see what services your new host offers, and make sure anything you have been using on your current host (like autoresponders, mail forwarding, etc.) is available.

4. If your current website is created using Microsoft Frontpage, make sure your new host supports Frontpage extensions.

5. Check to see what your new host’s policy is for extra bandwidth, in case your site continues to get busier.

6. If your new host’s server is a shared server, make sure that no adult sites are hosted on the same server. Adult sites can get very busy and slow down all the other websites that are hosted on the same server.

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.

Test your website to ensure that it’s working properly after you upload all your data to the new host. You should be able to preview your website on the new server before you completely switch your domain name over to the new site address.

Founder and actual CEO, Ricardo d’Argence has been in the field for more than twenty years. Alojate.com is now one of the biggest web hosting providers in Mexico, offering a range of services for all business needs. Servidores dedicados, Search Engine Optimization, factura electronica, web hosting & domain registration.