Tips on Migrating a Website With Minimal or NO Downtime
Tips on Migrating a Website With Minimal or NO Downtime:
Make Sure to Move Your Website And Files Before Cancelling
Don’t cancel your existing web hosting account before completing your.
This is the most common mistake made by website owners or administrators who are new to web hosting; they will contact the present host and inform them of their decision to move and you can guess what happens next!
When you signed up, first thing to do is transfer all the files to the new server. Test your site to make sure everything is working fine, all the files have been transferred and linked correctly and nothing has been forgotten.
It’s best to Download your Backup Files
Login to cPanel and create compressed backups of your website files and database information. It’s easy and the beauty is that the cPanel help-file is pretty self explanatory on how it all works. After creating the backup, just locate it and download it to your own computer. Just make sure not to decompress any file, the new server will take care of the decompression.
Transfer The Files
Now you can upload the compressed backup files to the new server.
Logging In
The email you received from us contained YOUR login information to the cPanel. Something with “:2082” port suffix address in order to enable an administrative login.
After logging into your cPanel “Control Panel”, locate the backup tools mentioned earlier then navigate to the Backup Downloads page. On this page, locate the file-upload box associated with the full-site backup. This is typically labeled as a “Backup Restore” feature. Select the full-site backup file (on your computer) that was downloaded from the old web hosting company to begin the upload process.
After the upload is completed, refreshed and file-specific details will be displayed on a line-by-line basis as each file is moved into place. When this second page stops loading, the process is done! You can now “Go Back” on your browser and return to the previous page and begin the database restoration process in pretty much the same process.
When everything is done, you would do your last setting and configuration changes that you may have previously set with your databases or configuration files to complete the whole process.
Make Sure Your Databases and Connection Are Set Right
This the step you’ll have to do manually, usch as making sure the database prefixes are changed (if any of course), any password changes you may have done while setting up your new databases must be addressed. This step may not be necessary for a straight HTML website with no database.
Change The New Name Servers With Your Registrar
After making sure that your website is working fine on the temporary domain provided by us, is time to switch your NameServers with your registrar
This is final step of the process of website transfer. This is done by logging into the domain registration control panel provided by the domain registrar.
Within this control panel, a heading or sidebar item named “Domain NameServers” should be visible (contact your registrar support if you are unable to find it), and the current information placed into that area:
NS5.ALLIEDSERVE.COM
NS6.ALLIEDSERVE.COM
Propagation Time (IMPORTANT WAITING PERIOD)
Propagation can take anywhere between 24 to 72 hours for the world to register the new location of your website. During which the World Wide Web “WWW” may bounce back and forth to the old server and the new server, hence you’ll have to wait until the full propagation is completed before going forth with cancelling your old hosting company. This way, during this back and forth time frame, your website will remain live throughout the process.
Cancellation Checkup (Final Step)
Last step before cancellation is to check your databases at the old server to make sure of any changes, such as new orders (if eCommerce site), new posts (if blogs) and etc. If all good and no problem is noted, you now can go ahead and send that cancellation notice or call in, which all is depending upon their terms and agreements of course.