Changing Web Hosts ? Step-By-Step Guide

Every webmaster cringes at the thought of moving hosts. Like moving your home it can be messy and sometimes problems arise. But if you follow these simple steps, your move will be less painful.

Backup Backup Backup
If you’ve been diligent with your backups, you’ve got a lot of insurance to fall back on yet always make the latest backup. If you haven’t, before you do anything else, do a backup now. Backup anything and everything you can and don’t forget your database if your site relies on it. Save at least 2 copies and store them separately. One for you to work with, and the other as an archive. Do not underestimate how easy it is to copy over these files as you make changes or simply mess it up.

If you’re moving to a host who has as different control panel, make a manual backup by downloading all your files because different control panels may not be able to restore the backups made by your old host. They also have different directory structures so your file trees will be in a mess. If you need to, make a small note file with notepad with memos for you to remember the old server configurations. This will help you as you make changes on your new host server and save the confusion moving back and forth between hosts. Remember to make the correct transfer type (ASCII or Binary) as you download. If your download is not right chances are you’ll have a tough time getting your site to work on the new host server.

If server logs are especially important, remember to backup those too. There is no good way of moving logs yet because different hosts may log statistics differently. So the best thing to do is to download it and use a log analyzer on your computer to make references to later on.
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How to find out what others site are hosted on your shared hosting server

Ever want to know who else is sharing your IP address on the internet ?

Sometimes thousands of sites are utilizing the same IP Address, and if one gets blacklisted it could potentially affect your site.

Although most shared hosting providers do a good job of keeping the bulk of their customers off of black list, you should know who your “IP neighbors” are.
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What are DNS records?

DNS records are useful if you need to point a domain/subdomain to another IP or hostname.

There are several types of DNS records you can create:

‘A’ record:

‘A’ record is used to point domains and subdomains to an IP address. This IP address can be any IP address, not confined to a server IP address. For example, your broadband connection at home is assigned a static IP by your ISP, then you can use A record to point a domain/subdomain to this IP address. After that you can call it by using the hostname, for instance: home.example.com or example.com.
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