If You Are Planning To Change Your Web Hosting Service, You Must Read This

Changing from one web hosting service to another superior web hosting service is an extremely important decision that can actually bring changes in your online business, either positively or negatively. You should only take this step of changing your web hosting service if it is extremely necessary and becomes unavoidable. If you must change the service, then the decision needs to be planned very carefully.

There are a lot of things you should know while changing your web hosting service. For example, you must now re-check that the new web hosting service should be able to take care of all the present and future requirements of your website.

Some of these important requirements are: checking how much the required disk space should be. You also must re-check requirements like the bandwidth, the uptime guarantee, the control panel, web applications, additional softwares, add-ons, web tools, migration of your databases to the new web server, mode of payments to the new service, and more importantly, the customer care service that they provide. You must also completely understand the new hosting service’s legal terms and conditions, and check carefully the reputation and quality of their web hosting service to their existing clients. You must also re-check all these things before taking the decision of whether that service suits your hosting needs.

Once you have searched the nearly perfect host for your website, you must then carefully move the entire data present, along with all the databases, from the old to the new web hosting service. Also, be sure that you take entire backup of your old website including its databases before moving the content to the new website. This ensures that the data is not lost while transferring and even in that case, you have the backups of everything so that you can successfully restore.

Before transferring your website, you can even redesign your website to make it compatible with the new hosting service environment. The redesigning job may include redesigning of a few web pages or even the entire website and its databases. It is going to be a hectic time for you if you are working alone on your website hosting. So, take help from friends and knowledgeable colleagues and relatives. You may even hire an expert who has sufficient experience of such issues.

There are some important things that you should know while changing your web host to make sure that you do not loose the existing web traffic, causing the downfall of your website as well as your online business. Some of these steps are mentioned below.

Using A Re-Direct Page On Your Old Website

You need to make sure that at least for some time, you have a redirect page on your old website which automatically transfers web traffic to your new website. This makes sure that your website visitors are transferred to your new website on the new web server, and do not come across an old website which is corrupt or empty. This is the most important step that you must undertake while changing your web host.

Customer Support

Make sure that the web hosting service that you are choosing has a top-quality and round-the clock customer support service. There should be enough phone-lines, online chats, and e-mail addresses available with the new web service through which you can contact their customer support if your website faces any difficulties not only while it is being transferred from the old hosting service, but for your site’s future needs, if any.

The technical department of the new web hosting service should be able to solve your difficulties quickly and professionally. Before choosing the service, you can even test the customer support department by asking them certain relevant questions and then finding out if they are competent enough. This may prove the quality of their customer support service and other issues that are offered to you. This is a very good idea of finding out how good is the customer support department of that particular web hosting service really is.

Compatibility

The next most important step you need to keep in mind is checking the type of operating system, like UNIX or Windows, that is present on the new web host’s web server and making sure that it is compatible with your entire website. Due to the differences in the way the databases and operating systems work, you must use the same type of operating system and the database management system as your old website was using.

This issue becomes very critical if your database has important data in it. If your website was not using database management system to store important data, then it does not matter if you change over to a different type of hosting plan. The Microsoft databases and operating system and the UNIX-type databases and operating systems work differently and they are not cent percent compatible. Hence, if you are planning the migration of your database to a different type, then you must take every care, test it rigorously, and also must have specific knowledge of how to migrate such data successfully.

Always take at least two backups of your databases. After the migration of the data to a different database management system, test the data thoroughly under varying test conditions. Only after the tests are completed and are successful, you can then make your website live again on the internet.

Checking The Disk Space

Before transferring your content to the new web hosting server, make sure that you have enough disk space available. You should even buy extra web space to make sure that when you want to increase the size of your website, for example, by expanding the number of web pages, or by adding multimedia and images, you do not face any shortage of the disk space.

Checking The BandWidth

Checking the amount of bandwidth that is provided by your web host is the most important factor. It can actually have effect or affect your website. You need to make sure that you have more than enough bandwidth, and make sure you never cross the limit that is offered to you. This is because, if you cross the bandwidth limit, you may be assessed with a fine, or sometimes, you and your web visitors may even loose access to your entire website till the beginning of the next month. This will bring a lot of loss to you as well as your online business.

You need to make sure that all the required softwares, web applications, web tools, add-ons, etc., are up-to-date and are then will be updated regularly. Make sure that all the web applications are running smoothly, and more importantly, these applications are compatible with the web script and content present on your website

It is also advisable that you check the reviews, comments, the forums and blogs for customer reports about your new host before choosing their web hosting service. It is better to do research thoroughly before opting for the new web hosting service.

These are some of the important issues that you should know while changing your web hosting service. Lastly, make sure that once you have moved the content from the old website to the new website, you test your new website thoroughly to make sure that everything, including all the hyper-links is working properly. Also see that all the web pages are checked thoroughly and none of them are showing any problems.

It is most likely that you are forced to change your web hosting service under unfortunate circumstances, for example, inferior hosting service, inferior or non-existing customer care service, or the frequent downtimes faced by your website. Therefore, you must be very careful when you wish to change your web hosting service. Your website is too valuable, even if it is only a simple one-page website. Find a good web host that will take every care of your site and become an asset to your online presence for a long time in future.