how to move my web site to your service? this question has been asked many time.

often, client has an existing web site and would like to move to a new hosting provider. if planned properly, the migration is smooth, no downtime will occur.

here’s how.

1)first, make a full backup. if your web pages are all static, you, or your web designer, should have a complete copy, but just in case, make a backup no matter what. if yours is dynamic, such as forum or blog, you have to do a backup. to backup, either download everything on current server to your local computer, or make use of backup feature of your hosting account control panel. or better, do both.

2)sign up for new/our hosting account. once we receive payment, we’ll activate account and email you order confirmation together with account information on the same day.

3)login to our hosting account control panel, create email accounts, restore backup if your previous provider uses cpanel as well, or upload web pages mannually. please note this is done on our server while the old account is still running. so before you do anything to domain name, the same content exist on both server, ours and previous provider’s.

4)go to domain management control panel, update DNS to our nameservers. this is not hosting account control panel, it’s domain management control panel. where you bought domain name may or may not be the same as where you bought hosting account. you may need to ask your current hosting provider to change DNS for you if they registered domain on behalf of you but didn’t give you access info.

5)wait for up to 72 hours ( in theory, in reality 24 hours is all it takes in most cases.) so that new DNS can be propogated all over the world. during this period, some visitors will hit new/our server, some will hit previous server, but since you have exactly same copy on both server, visitors won’t notice it. for .com .net .org domain names, this process takes only a few minutes nowadays.

of course, sometimes it’s more complicated. for example, if you run a forum, you need to close it while migration, otherwise content on your site keep changing, you won’t have a final version to move.

if you would like to transfer the domain name to new host as well, you’d better ask new host to initiate transfer process after site migration is complete.