Digital Compass

How to Move your site to your New WebHost Provider - There are several causes that why you may prefer to move your site. Your site may get a lot of hits that your present webhosting supplier can't meet your demands any more. Or you may have more basic reason of being sick of bad service!

Remember these points in memory when you move your site:

Your site is a priceless possession and you don't prefer to lose it. You require to make a replicate of your web site as it's then move it over to your fresh webhost. There are several methods of achieving this.

You may either

Use your preferred FTP software also copy the files from your ‘older’ webhost to a risk-free place on your local personal computer. Copy complete files and folders from your host to your local machine. This will insure that all your every file and picture are placed in the right folders.

You may use the inbuilt backup facility of your Cpanel. In Control Panel it's simple. For different types of cpanels you'll have to study the documentation or check from your webhosting provider how to do it right. In Control Panel, simply choose the Backups icon and select the ‘Download a home directory backup’ link. This will make a ZIP file of all the files on your host. If your web site consists of HTML webpages a file support is all that's needed, even so, if your web site has active content and is built upon a database engine, you should backup your SQL database also. This could be done in 2 ways.

1) By choosing Download a MySQL Database Backup in the Backups alternative in your Control Panel, or

2) By getting right away into your MySQL database and executing a full SQL export.

If you're not sure on how to move your website make the best of a database or not, you must certainly take advice from your webmaster or hosting expert to do this for you. Some tips to look at:

* If you're having an active web site with lots of traffic interaction (for example a forum) it may be wise to switch off the older web site altogether when the propagation takes place. You may suffer some loss in the traffic to the old web site, but if you do not do this you'll notice that visitors will still interact and publish message on the older web site and these will ne'er end up on the current one. (Remember, your backup is a snapshot in time. Anything that's posted to the older web site after you've taken the backup won't come out on the new web site)

* E-mails also needed to be set up on the new web site. For a while you're starting to have an disruption in the e-mail service. It helps to switch your e-mail server settings in your Outlook Express to point right away to the IP of the mail server.

* You'll lose your logs completely, including all traffic logs and visitor stats, when you move. If you want to retain your log files you may or may not be capable to download them to your personal computer and use an offline analyser.

* Be sure that you make your shift during a low traffic period. You should be capable to look from your site stats which periods during the calendar week have low traffic. Note that the move is going to take forty-eight hrs to complete