How to (Properly) Transfer Over to Your New Host

ARTICLE BY James Costa | POSTED ON April 13th, 2010 | Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

I’ve been through a good deal of hosts over the last few years. Whether I’ve interacted with them directly, or heard opinions through IT departments, it’s tough to find a good place to host your files. The guys with great support often have crappy servers, and the guys with awesome servers often have crappy support. It’s sad to say, then, that I can never remember how to transfer over everything properly and always end up messing something up.

No, this isn’t an article that is going to be telling you that you need to transfer your site to a pretty host like Site5 (although they’re pretty damn awesome, and you should use this referral link if you’re so inclined to do so). Nor am I going to rant and rave why my old host was the biggest pain in the ass. Instead, I’m going to tell you how to properly transfer your site over to a new host that you think is the bee’s knees.

I wanted to apologize to all readers for the last couple of weeks of mediocrity with the switch. As some “veteran” readers will know, I don’t post those Twitter-status-update-worthy-articles that plague other blogs, so I needed some relative article to place this apology on top of. Here’s my excuse for an apology!

That, and I’m incredibly terrible with a lot of tech stuff and it took me an embarassing amount of attempts to make the switch. It could have gone a ton easier, but I did things completely wrong. In hindsight, however, the transfer between hosts shouldn’t be that difficult and should be considerably smooth. In wanting to share my experiences and mistakes with you, the reader, I’ve compiled this article to ensure that the next time you need to make the switch, it will be very straightforward.

Please note that everyone has a different method and step-by-step process on how to transfer hosts. There are also a multitude of situations where more work will be required. This transfer is based on a very basic setup with your host. Here, then, is how to (properly) transfer everything over to your new host!

Preface

When transferring over to a new host, always use a different e-mail than the one you’ll be moving. E.g. if you’re moving yourwebsite.com, don’t use yourname@yourwebsite.com to be e-mailing the new host – instead, use a third party e-mail provider for the time being. Saves you a lot of pain!

Get Everything Ready

Go ahead and buy the hosting from that new spiffy host you’ve been wanting to change to for the last little while. Make sure you receive an e-mail that provides you with all your login information, IP address of the server, and the DNS nameservers you’ll need to hook up later.

Also, find the e-mail of your old host that has all this same information. This way if you need it later, you don’t have to be fiddling around for it!

Transfer Your Domain Name

This is generally the easiest part of the process, and optional. Having your domain name and hosting under the same host makes things a hell of a lot easier when it comes to tracking receipts, etc.

If you don’t want to make this transfer (or your new host can’t support domain names), then you can simply ignore this step in the process.

If you do want to do this, then get in touch with your old domain name registrar and tell them you want to transfer your domain name. (Note: if you don’t know who your domain registrar is, and you signed up with a domain name and hosting package from your hosting, you’ll need to get in touch with them.) They’ll unlock your domain name and provide you with an EPP Transfer Key to provide to your new host. Your new host will use this to activate the domain name under them. This process usually takes a couple days.

If you have the IP address associated to your website being hosted on your old host, you can go ahead and change the DNS to the new host’s nameservers. This way, if the change is quicker than you expected, you can still generate a backup by accessing your site through it’s IP address. Otherwise, I’d suggest to hold off for now so we can manage one thing at a time!

Put Up Some Blinds

This is a step in the process I didn’t do, but should have done. So that people don’t make any changes to files on your server, put up some temporary pages so that people know you’re switching hosts. Otherwise, just create a blank index.html file and place it in the root directory (usually /public_html/) so that nothing is able to be seen.

If you are comfortable with .htaccess redirects, setting one up is useful. While blocking out the index.html file so no one sees anything is useful, if someone knows the link to any of your other pages, they will still be able to see those. For help on setting up a nifty .htaccess redirect, check out this article.

If you have a short amount of e-mail addresses on your account, I’d also suggest setting an autoresponder for each e-mail telling people that you’re in the midst of switching hosters and that they should e-mail you back if they haven’t heard from you in 2-3 business days. Just in case!

The reason for doing all this is because you will be generating a backup in the next step of all your files, and it will create a backup of all the files in their state at the time of backup. Any changes to the site’s files or e-mails won’t be brought over.

Create a Backup

We are now going to create a backup of all the files on your old host so that they can be brought over to the new one. If you’re using CPanel in your backend, you can create this yourself by finding the link for “Backup.” All you need to do is click on “Download or Generate a Full Web Site Backup,” set up where the backup will be placed when it’s been created, and download it from that location when you’re ready.

If you’re using a control panel that isn’t CPanel-based, then you need to get in touch with your old host to create this backup file for you of all the files and settings on your server.

If your backup is rather large, most hosts will be okay with letting you place the backup in your /public_html/ directory with a CHMOD of 755 so that they can download it and implement it. That way, you don’t need to download it and upload it to the new server (and, trust me, this saved me a good 3 hours).

Implement the Backup

Now is the fun part. Once you’ve sent your new host this backup you’ve created, they’ll go ahead and deploy all the files on your new server. This is all done on their end, and involves no work on your end. One thing I would suggest to do to make sure everything is nice and working is to ask them for your new site’s IP address (should come in your welcome e-mail) so you can view all the files to see that they’re all there and ready for your visitors.

Change the DNS

Now that the files have been implemented and everything is working properly, make sure to change the DNS over to your new host’s. This can take a few hours, but is the last part of the process. Once your nameservers have been set over to your new host, you’ll be good to go with the new site!

What Do You Think?

Is this process right? Am I missing anything, or is there an easier way to do it? Share in the comments below!

Quick Apology and Update

I’d like to humbly apologize to all readers and visitors for the last couple of weeks of troubles with the site. From certain articles trending that couldn’t be found, to a large amount of images missing, the site has had quite the ride over the last week. I also neglected to write an article last week, as I’ve just moved and had limited time to work on something of the quality expected. Instead, I put those few hours of focus towards getting everything back together, and everything is running better than ever! Now we’ll hopefully get to posting an extra article or two per week with some new changes!

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